‘John Henry Newman’ Review: A Heart That Speaks to Hearts

From The Wall Street Journal-

John Henry Newman was and is an exceptional figure. This October he was declared a saint by the Catholic Church, the first English saint created in half a century. For much of Newman’s life, he struggled with unpopularity, misunderstanding and vilification from his various opponents. He was the most distinguished and the most original English theologian since the Middle Ages, but he was disliked and distrusted by many in the Catholic Church, as well as by the English Protestants and unbelievers whom he had horrified by his defection, in 1845, from the Church of England. Yet when he died, aged 89 in 1890, in an England still generally anti-Catholic, he had become, as Eamon Duffy says in this splendid book, an unlikely “national treasure” to whom Tennyson and Matthew Arnold —by no means Catholics—had written polite but puzzled tributes.

Newman wrote a great deal. He published half a dozen books, a number of essays that are central to the understanding of Catholic thought, three good hymns (including “Lead, Kindly Light”), a bad long poem (“The Dream of Gerontius,” later transformed by Edward Elgar’s music) and 32 volumes of letters and diaries. Anyone daunted by more weighty biographies, the best being Ian Ker’s (1988), should read Eamon Duffy’s short, fresh account. The Cambridge scholar of religion’s calm judgment expertly illuminates every aspect of Newman’s life, work and—until he was very old—unceasing mental and spiritual attention.

More here-

https://www.wsj.com/articles/john-henry-newman-review-a-heart-that-speaks-to-hearts-11576857796