Personal Influence

Newman put his personal influence aside whenever he preached so that he can rely on the Holy Spirit to touch and move hearts toward conversion. That's the reason why he had a monotone way of delivering his sermons. Hence, his influence is still made upon Christians, in and through the example of his docility, meekness, and humility, in the presence of the Holy Spirit, who blows wherever He wills, and guides the Christian soul, in the ways of the Lord. Blessed John Henry Newman, pray for us!

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Religion the Right Way

Dr. Crosby does an incredible job at explaining the profound significance of the thought of St. John Henry Newman for our daily lives. A relationship with God is not merely some abstract matter, nor is it merely some simple good feeling. It is a personal communion with He who created us each individually, who sees us each individually, and who cares about each of us individually. Personalism as a school of thought in general balances between the errors of individualism, which we see in a hyper form in many Western societies, and collectivism, which reduces the person to a cog in the machine. It sees that man is an individual endowed with subjectivity but is always in community, in intersubjectivity with others. It recognizes that man is personally free and responsible, but is fulfilled in freely responding to value and to the Other as another I. Crosby shows how Newman, though not a professional philosopher by trade, is as shrewd in many of the matters of philosophy of the human person as contemporaries like his Protestant counterpart Kierkegaard and later phenomenologists and existentialists like Husserl, Scheler, Marcel, and others, many of whom were personalists. If you are a philosopher who is also a believer, this is the perfect book for you. Newman is a much more philosophically sophisticated thinker than most theologians, seeing things extremely lucidly and rigorously in terms that probe the depths and the crux of each matter. Newman is a thinker who bridges the gap between a dry abstract thought of Scholasticism and its mainly cerebral relation to God and modern existential thought which highlights the now undeniably obvious centrality of the heart. If God is love and in relationship with us, then certainly a lot more matters than our intellect in relation to him as some Christian relationship in general. He wants you to love him as only you can do. And the same goes for your calling in life and to others.