A Newman Quintet, Two Lectures & Weekly Roundup

Five books sure to please any lover of the English Catholic theologian

It’s been a busy week! TAN has announced that my forthcoming book, Turned Around: Replying to the Most Common Objections Against the Traditional Latin Mass, is now available for pre-order (expected release: October 22; read more about it here). Meanwhile, Emmaus Academic sent me, for review, the copy-edited manuscript of my next academic monograph — Anatomy of Transcendence: Mental Transport and Extreme Psychic States in the Thought and Life of Thomas Aquinas. Tomorrow I head up to Chicago for the Saturday world premiere of my motet Ego Dilecto Meo (ATTBB, text taken from the Canticle of Canticles). Laus Deo et Mariae!

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The great Catholic light of the 19th century

I’ve been wanting for a long time to write a few words about one of my all-time favorite theologians and churchmen, John Henry Newman, and to tell you about some recent publications concerning him.

Newman has been a steady presence in my life ever since my freshman year at Georgetown University (it was to be my only year there, as I left at the end of it to start afresh at Thomas Aquinas College in California). I don’t recall how Newman was first brought to my attention in the Liberal Arts Seminar, but somehow I landed on the idea of writing about the Apologia Pro Vita Sua for a term paper. This got me hooked, and I began to read more extensively in the pages of the great Anglican convert to Catholicism. The following year, at TAC, I brought with me a prized copy of the complete Parochial and Plain Sermons in the one-volume Ignatius Press edition with bible-thin paper, which over the course of that year I savored, page by page, for spiritual reading.

Only later did I discover how influential and beloved an author Newman has been for traditionalists over the past sixty years.