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.

Teaching Newman to undergraduates has yielded unexpected research rewards. Thanks in part to students in my St. John Henry Newman Seminar, the NINS Digital Collections has recently added a previously unknown letter, written 8 November 1845 from Newman to Rev. Joseph Oldknow, Perpetual Curate of Holy Trinity, Bordesley, Birmingham. My students and I may have been the first to examine the letter since its donation several years ago to the St. John the Evangelist Library of Christendom College, by William H. Marshner, Professor Emeritus of Theology. When the Director of the Library, Andrew V. Armstrong, learned of the course, he let me know about the manuscript and suggested that I examine it.

There are two letters from Charles Warren Adams included in the NINS Digital Collections, the first is dated 1862 and is addressed to Bishop Grant of Southwark. Adams (1833–1903) was a London journalist, who was an author in his spare time. Under the pseudonym Charles Felix, Adams wrote the detective novel The Notting Hill Mystery (1865), which is widely acknowledged as one of the earliest examples of detective fiction.

It is always exciting when a previously unknown Newman letter comes to light. When Oxford University Press’s Letters and Diaries were being compiled the editors scoured the globe for every piece of correspondence from the Cardinal that could be found. Despite this, letters they missed continue to appear. In January after cataloguing some letters written by the Right Reverend Patrick John Ryan, Archbishop of Philadelphia to Cardinal Newman, I contacted the Catholic Historical Research Centre at the Archdiocese of Philadelphia to let them know that these letters were now online and to ask if they knew where Newman’s replies were.

During my internship for NINS, I took great pleasure in reading the letters of Richard Simpson, a former Anglican priest numbered among the prominent Catholic converts of the time. He was most known for his involvement in the Liberal Catholic movement through the Rambler, a periodical which served to allow the prominent lay converts of the time to express their views to the masses. We currently have a total of 64 letters penned by Richard Simpson in the Digital Collections, of which most were directed to St. John Henry Newman. Despite their often-mundane nature (as is often the case with historical letters), they provide a window into the man Richard Simpson, as well as into the unfolding of the Rambler situation in 1859 as it suffered attacks by the English Bishops.

In the nineteenth century, tensions were acutely felt in religious controversies, such as the Protestant emphasis on sola scriptura, which often privileged individual interpretation over ecclesial tradition, and emerging Catholic debates over historical-critical methods, as exemplified by figures like Alfred Loisy and the Modernist Crisis. John Henry Newman navigated similar turbulent waters as an Anglican convert to Catholicism, developed an implicit pneumatological hermeneutics that positioned the Holy Spirit as the vital guide for both personal and communal engagement with the biblical text. 

One letter from the Rev. Hussey to Newman is available on the digital collections. In this letter, he discusses Tract 90. Hussey’s main passion lay in astronomy. No sooner had he been granted the living of Hayes, where he served as rector, than in 1831 he began work to build an observatory at the rear of the property.

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. 

The NINS Digital Collections contain twenty-nine letters from Sir James Marshall. Marshall grew up in Edinburgh, the son of the Rev. James Marshall, a Scottish Presbyterian minister. He received his degree at Exeter College, Oxford and was ordained in Anglican Orders in 1852. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1857, but due to the fact he had lost an arm in a childhood accident, was barred from being ordained a Catholic Priest.

There are two letters on the Digital Collections, written to Cardinal Newman from W. T. Stead, in his capacity as editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. Stead was a prominent nineteenth-century English journalist and a pioneer of the journalistic profession. He first began writing for newspapers in 1870 at1 the age of 21, and the following year was made editor of The Northern Echo, becoming the youngest newspaper editor in the country.