In western, modern societies we live in a culture of superabundance. Store shelves are overflowing with products, and we can choose from a wide variety of diets. We always have something to wear, and we can dress differently every day of the week. Thanks to the internet, we can access cultural goods every day, both in terms of high and low culture. Despite this, the scale of mental problems and sadness is enormous. So, is it not true that we have many things in excess, but we lack what is most important: love? This article looks into the wisdom of Doctor of the Church, Saint John Henry Newman for answers to this question. Argued here is that what he said in the sermon “Love, the One Thing needful,” can be our guide.
On October 5, 2025, our own NINS co-founder Catharine Ryan was invited to give a sermon at St. Mary's University Church in Oxford, standing at the same pulpit from which John Henry Newman preached 200 years ago. This sermon was first published on the University Church website and is reposted here with their permission.
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.
The cumulative effect of the theological debates at Oxford, together with his pastoral experience and personal reflections, gradually led Newman to a more high church ecclesiological approach, especially on visibility, invisibility, and apostolicity of the church.
Newman tended to talk about wealth and commerce in two ways: one prophetic and denunciatory, particularly of nations of shopkeepers, and one with applause—this is the nation of free enterprise.
