Two major pieces of literature on Augustus Welby Pugin (1812–1852), the renowned Gothic Revivalist and Catholic convert who designed Big Ben, the Houses of Parliament, six cathedrals, and more, state, in summary fashion, that Pugin illustrated St John Henry Newman’s Live of the English Saints. The late Professor Margaret Belcher, however, provided a great deal of detail on this subject in the second volume of her The Collected Letters of A.W.N. Pugin, published in 2003. This essay republishes, for the first time since 1914, all eleven of Pugin’s illustrations and does so for the first time ever in a single document.

Matthew Levering’s Newman on Doctrinal Corruption navigates St. John Henry Newman’s responses to five separate challenges directed against the Catholic Church.

Festivals of Faith: Sermons for the Liturgical Year, by St. John Henry Newman, edited by Melinda Nielsen, presents an impressive and carefully arranged collection of Newman’s homilies. 

Time to Delay No Longer is, as its subtitle suggests, a true search for faith. In this work, the late Bill Evans (1933–2017) endeavors to recount his conversion to the Catholic faith. His account of conversion centers around a profound systematic analysis of the Catholic Church and its claim towards religious authority.

If our charge as Christians is to be holy in all that we do, what does this way of life look like in today’s world? This question is not easily answered simply by looking to past examples. 

Earlier this year, NINS got the chance to sit down with Grant Kaplan and discuss the release of his new book Faith and Reason through Christian History -- Dr. Kaplan provides some helpful insights into the genesis and implications of his book.

“The LORD is with me to the end. LORD, your mercy endures forever. Never forsake the work of your hands! – Psalm 138:8 -- The above verse is one of importance to John Henry Newman. He chose Psalm 138 as the epithet for his younger brother, Charles’s, headstone. Newman’s biographer, Sheridan Gilley, refers to Charles as “the black sheep of the family.” 

Anne Carpenter was kind enough to give NINS some insight into her new book Nothing Gained is Eternal (Fortress, 2022), where she provides a refreshing metaphysical perspective on the topic of Christian Tradition.

On 12 September 1830 Newman preached a sermon in the University Church entitled “Jeremiah, A Lesson for the Disappointed.” It has not, so far as I am aware, ever attracted a great deal of attention. Though it was later published in Parochial and Plain Sermons—“the most important publication not only of Newman’s Protestant days, but of his life,” as Owen Chadwick once averred—it had to wait til volume eight for inclusion: hardly typical of “The Very Best Of …” territory.

That is fitting in a way, however. For the whole topic of “Jeremiah, A Lesson for the Disappointed” is the fact of being overlooked, of deserving recognition but not getting it, of striving and failing—or rather, of seeming to fail.

Pope Francis speaks about our “increasing difficult[y]” in “discern[ing] what is proper to humans and what is proper to technology.” In this moment, the Holy Father stresses our need for “serious reflection on the very value of the human person” especially, “the concept of personal consciousness as relational experience,” and he exhorts us to draw upon our “shared human experiences” by studying them “from various perspectives, employing trans-disciplinary dialogue and cooperation.” Inspired by the Holy Father, I take a step in that direction by reflecting upon St. John Henry Newman’s view of the manifold aspects of the mystery of the human person.