Michael Healy

What Newman and Aristotle mean by the Lesbian Canon

Jan. 21 at 12:33pm

I appreciate Jules' wonderful quote from Newman (below) on the education of adolescents!  It is of prudential importance for universities and their student life policies, of course, but also for all parents, most of whom have a natural tendency toward overprotectiveness. But it is especially relevant--I would think--for homeschoolers.

Perhaps in the modern day, however, it is important to clarify what Newman is talking about when he refers to Aristotle's comments on the "Lesbian Canon" from Nicomachean Ethics, 5, 14.  Thus I append the explanation below with a line from the text and the accompanying footnote by Francis Lieber:

chapter xxix.: advantages of institutional government, …

Jules van Schaijik

John Henry Newman on the education of adolescents

Jan. 21 at 8:27am

A discussion we had in our class on Courtship in the Christian Vision, made me go back to this great quote from Newman, which I found in Fergal McGrath’s Newman’s University: Idea and Reality (pp. 338 – 339). It is far too good an example of Newman’s personalist wisdom not to share it here.

I will not comment on the passage other than by fully agreeing with McGrath, who introduces it by saying that “lengthy as the passage is, it deserves quotation in full, as saying about all that is worth saying of the difficult and ever-recurring problem of combining liberty and discipline in adolescent education.”

It is assuredly a most delicate and difficult matter to manage youths, and those lay …

Michael Healy

Genuine Religion and Conventional Religion in the Current Season

Dec. 30, 2011, at 11:56am

Besides the distinction Mircea Eliade makes between the religious and the secular man (see earlier post, Dec. 26), one can further distinguish between the genuinely religious man and the conventionally religious man.  The latter follows religion more out of social habit or expectation rather than authentic faith and devotion. 

            John Henry Cardinal Newman calls this a distinction between vital religion and nominal religion.  Soren Kierkegaard conveys the same idea with his distinction between a Christianity which is socially acceptable compared to Christianity as a “scandal,” as described in the Acts of the Apostles.  We could perhaps capture the difference here in five points.

Jules van Schaijik

The creed as a devotional act

Dec. 12, 2011, at 10:09am

Over the weekend I expressed to a friend how much I love the re-introduction of "consubstantial" in the creed. Not that I had any difficulties with the previous translation. "One in being with" seems to me about as clear and direct as can be. Still, I like the change, and I think my liking has a lot to do with some passages from Newman's Grammar of Assent that I read and pondered many times while writing my master's thesis.

In the first of these, Newman deals with the charge, also heard today, that the term "consubstantial" is needlessly abstruse and likely to result only in unending, fruitless controversy. Newman shows how this objection has a long history in the Church and also how it …

Jules van Schaijik

The modernity of Newman

Oct. 4, 2010, at 12:30pm

In a recent talk I gave on his life and thought, I tried to explain that John Henry Newman is an especially important saint for our times, in large part because of the modernity of his faith. He lived in a culture that, in spite of some obvious differences, is nevertheless very close to our own. But he did not just live in this culture, he was also a part of it. His inner life and thought was shaped by it, and so, therefore, was his faith. Newman, in other words, shows us what holiness looks like in today’s world.

In a recent interview Pope Benedict XVI expresses the same point better than I did. Asked about the significance of Newman, he answered (in part)

Newman is, above all, a …

Katie van Schaijik

Benedict on Newman

Sep. 25, 2010, at 8:10pm

The Friends of Newman have a web page dedicated to his influence on Pope Benedict.  This passage highlights several of the themes we touched on at our gathering last night.  It also makes me think how close he and Wojtyla were in their thinking.

For Newman, the middle term which establishes the connection between authority and subjectivity is truth. I do not hesitate to say that truth is the central thought of Newman’s intellectual grappling. Conscience is central for him because truth stands in the middle. To put it differently, the centrality of the concept of conscience for Newman is linked to the prior centrality of the concept of truth and can only be understood from that vantage …

Jules van Schaijik

Education in cyberspace?

Sep. 22, 2010, at 2:14pm

As a parent with two children in college and three to follow soon, I sympathize with Roger Scruton’s recent article in the American Spectator. Given the condition of the average university in America today, one does wonder whether they are worth the money and time they take. And that’s not to mention the moral and religious risks they pose. It is understandable that more and more people are starting to look for alternatives.*

I have doubts, however, that the alternative that Scruton proposes is a good one:

I envisage an experiment in “distance learning,” in which students work from home, and attend lectures, receive tutorials, and engage in discussions through Internet …

Katie van Schaijik

Newman Beatified today

Sep. 19, 2010, at 12:35pm

From an article in the UK Guardian:

When Cardinal John Henry Newman died in August 1890, the Manchester Guardian’s obituary spoke of him as one of the very greatest masters of English style - the paper meant prose, not dress sense - and a man “of singular beauty and purity of character … an eminent example of personal sanctity”.

Today, 120 years on, the Roman Catholic church finally caught up and beatified him, the penultimate stage to his being made a saint.

And from the Pope’s homily at last night’s vigil Mass in Hyde Park, attended by 80,000 faithful:

As you know, Newman has long been an important influence in my own life and thought, as he has been for so many people …

Katie van Schaijik

An anger image

Nov. 15, 2009, at 8:51pm

A chapter about the passing of Cardinal Newman I came across tonight concludes with some description of his reputation among his Victorian English contemporaries. Some were dismissive or contemptuous. Others—clerics, men of letters and statesmen like Gladstone, revered him for his moral stature and literary genius.

But it is with the name of a poet, the only one of the Victorian converts to the Church with a vision in literature transcending his own, that I shall end my list of the lovers of Newman—even as in a procession the greatest figure is the last:

Sweetly the light
Shines from the solitary peak at Edgbaston,

sang Coventry Patmore, who understood that even the polemical …

Katie van Schaijik

Newman on perfection

Sep. 29, 2009, at 10:25pm

Here is the context for the great Newman quote in Jules’ post below.

A Short Road to Perfection

September 27, 1856

IT is the saying of holy men that, if we wish to be perfect, we have nothing more to do than to perform the ordinary duties of the day well. A short road to perfection—short, not because easy, but because pertinent and intelligible. There are no short ways to perfection, but there are sure ones.

I think this is an instruction which may be of great practical use to persons like ourselves. It is easy to have vague ideas what perfection is, which serve well enough to talk about, when we do not intend to aim at it; but as soon as a person really desires and sets about …

Katie van Schaijik

Anniversary of the death of Newman

Aug. 11, 2009, at 9:34am

On August 11, 1890, John Henry Cardinal Newman died in Birmingham, England, where he will be beatified next May. The words on his tombstone: “Out of the shadows and into Reality.”

Among my favorite of his sermons is On the Greatness and Littleness of Human Life.

Read at least these two paragraphs, if you haven’t got time for the whole beautiful thing. They give us a taste of the absolute joy he must have experienced on that day 119 years ago, and of how he had yearned for it his whole long life. They also give a feel for his profound personalism.

This is from the early part, leading the congregation toward a more vivid sense of the fleetingness and relative insubstantiality of …

Katie van Schaijik

Secret Faults

Jun. 7, 2009, at 11:51am

Speaking of Newman:
Last week the Personalist Project sponsored its first Directors and Advisers retreat in beautiful Spring Lake, NJ. Eleven of us gathered for three days of leisurely philosophical communion on the theme of forgiveness. To get us in the right frame of mind for approaching such a mysterious and fearful reality, Michael Healy read us Newman’s sermon, “Secret Faults” on Sunday evening.

I yield to no one in devotion to Newman. To me he is the great thinker of the whole modern period, as well as an unsurpassed personal influence. But I have doubts about this sermon. I remember John Crosby once saying that the more he reads Newman’s Anglican sermons, the more he feels in them …

Jules van Schaijik

Here’s hoping that West pays no attention

Jun. 7, 2009, at 11:21am

I have been following the discussion (on this site) about Christopher West and his presentation of the Theology of the Body and find it all very helpful. Lots of good points made on both sides.  But what is helpful to me and many others on the sidelines, may well be detrimental to West and the beautiful message he is trying to spread.

There is a definite danger (to use Healy’s words) of “nitpicking Chris to death on his presentation.”  He has a message to deliver: too much second guessing would keep him from doing it.  Attempting to anticipate all objections or prevent all possible misunderstandings, would take the life and sparkle out of his talks.  What he might gain in precision and …