John Henry Cardinal Newman

Discussions and Arguments on Various Subjects, volume VII in the Birmingham Oratory Millenium Edition, is a collection of six articles, which were written between 1835, after the publication of The Arians of the Fourth Century, and 1866, when, as a Roman Catholic, Newman contributed a review to the Jesuit periodical The Month. Two of these articles appeared as Tracts for the Times; two are a series of letters to a newspaper. The letters discuss the nature of scientific knowledge as a quasi-substitute for faith, and the nature of the balance between executive power and democratic constraints. The opening essay, in the imaginary setting of the Roman forum, is a discussion between three friends of the nature of the via media, its shortcomings, and how it can be made to work. This book has been unavailable for many years and contains some of Newman's best and most amusing writing, scattered throughout with historical and literary references, which have been extensively researched for the modern reader in this edition.

In Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations, Cardinal Newman examines Catholicism from the inside, addressing popular prejudices with humor and irony. John Henry Newman, aged 48, now a Catholic priest, arrives in Birmingham in 1849 as the head of a religious community. Discourses Addressed to Mixed Congregations, "more rhetorical than my former sermons," examines Catholicism from the inside and deals with the popular prejudices which contemporaries entertained of it. We can see the same touch which he displayed in the pulpit of St. Mary's now used to explain the truths of the faith which he had embraced. But he allows his humor and irony to enable him to reach those "who do not narrow their belief to their experience." This edition reveals the context of the Discourses and contains a wealth of references.

John Henry Newman's The Church of the Fathers contains some of his earliest writings on fourth-century Christianity. Composed at about the same time as The Arians of the Fourth Century and the first Tracts of the Oxford Movement, this polemical book was aimed at the general reader and is filled with extracts from Patristic writings. In 1833 British Parliament enacted the controversial Irish Church Temporalities Bill, which proposed abolishing ten of the twenty-two sees of the Anglican Church of Ireland. Newman accused the State of violating the ancient doctrine of Apostolic Succession. In The Church of the Fathers, Newman draws parallels between the situation facing the Church in the fourth century and the Anglican Church in his day. Published here for the first time in more than a century, this edition of The Church of the Fathers reunites material that had become separated in ongoing republications of Newman's works. The text and appendices also contain original Newman material that has never before been published.

Rise and Progress of Universities and Benedictine Essays contains a selection of publications from the middle (1854-56) and late (1858-59) periods of John Henry Newman's association with the Catholic University of Ireland. The Rise and Progress of Universities consists of the twenty articles first published in the Catholic University Gazette from 1854-56. The last two essays of this volume, the Benedictine Essays, originally appeared in The Atlantis, which Newman instituted specifically for the publication of research by his faculty. An introduction to this volume, written by noted Newman scholar Mary Katherine Tillman, emphasizes the integral relation between the Rise and Progress of Universities essays on the historical development of universities, and Newman's "bare and necessary idea" of a university, as set forth in his seminal work, The Idea of a University.

Newman was told that Catholic priests do not read sermons, but this does not mean that he made them up as he went along. He planned his Catholic sermons as meticulously as he did his famous Parochial and Plain, but he committed them to memory and then he made notes afterwards. His sermons, delivered over a period of thirty years, provide some fascinating insights into his active mind and the range of subjects he covered within the framework of the Church's liturgical year. James Mozley, writing in 1946, said, "A sermon of Mr. Newman's enters into our feelings, ideas, and modes of viewing things. Persons look into Mr. Newman's sermons and see their own thoughts in them." Unpublished for ninety years, Sermon Notes of John Henry Cardinal Newman shows Newman's brilliant mind at work.