Features
How the Achilli Trial changed John Henry Newman
At this pivotal point in his life, when so many of his Catholic endeavors lay before him, Newman was transformed, becoming an English Catholic at home […]
Articles by Edward Short
Features
John Henry Newman, Edward Gibbon, and the true character of history
The rise of Christianity, for Newman, primarily involved those who accepted and cooperated with God’s particular Providence and those who rejected and spurned it. Gibbon, […]
The Dispatch
A conversation with Dr. Pia Matthews about sanctity, disability, and the culture of death
In speaking with Dr. Pia Matthews, the author of God’s Wild Flowers: Saints with Disabilities (Gracewing, 2016), a brilliant meditation on how sanctity and disability intersect in the lives of the Saints, I am struck not only […]
History
The Living and the Dead and Alfred Lord Tennyson
Early and late, Tennyson’s theme was mortal beauty. In The Princess (1847), when he was scarcely forty, he set it to an enchanting music. The splendor falls on castle walls And snowy summits old in […]
Books
Travesties of Newman
No Englishman—or only Lord Byron—ever fascinated his countrymen more than John Henry Cardinal Newman. Lord Macaulay was convinced that the British public’s fascination with Byron was mostly pharisaical. For the great Whig historian, the man […]
Books
“No summer progress”: Eliot and the defense of Christian civilization
It has been more than 50 years since T.S. Eliot died in 1965, and looking back over that period we can see that the decadence he predicted would overtake the West if it chose to […]
Books
“The Fleshly Tables of the Heart”: Newman in His Letters
In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare has his great heroine tell her attendant Iras how she foresees posterity treating her and her entourage after death, Nay, ‘tis most certain, Iras: saucy lictors Will catch at us, […]
Books
Newman, The Oxford Movement, and the Hunger for Dogma
In the preface that John Henry Newman wrote as an old man to a reissue of Tract 90, the pamphlet that preceded his conversion to the Church of Rome, he made some characteristically incisive points. […]
Interview
John Henry Newman and Catholic Higher Education
Recently, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Paul Shrimpton, who teaches mathematics at Magdalen College School, Oxford, to talk to him about his wonderful new book The “Making of Men”: The Idea and […]
General
Conversations with the Catechists
Not long ago I was reflecting upon the work of St. John the Baptist, and this put me in mind of my local parish church in Astoria, New York, the Church of Saint Rita, where […]