“It is one Great Advantage of an Age in Which Unbelief Speaks out, That Faith Can Speak out too; That, if Falsehood Assails Truth, Truth Can Assail Falsehood”

EDITORIAL PREFACE 3 “IT IS ONE grEaT advaNTagE Of aN agE IN whICh uNbElIEf SpEakS OuT, ThaT faITh CaN SpEak OuT TOO; ThaT, If falSEhOOd aSSaIlS TruTh, TruTh CaN aSSaIl falSEhOOd.” JOHN HENRY NEWMAN, THE IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY In his essay,“A Form of Infidelity of the Day,” Newman insisted:“It is one great advantage of an age in which unbelief speaks out, that Faith can speak out too; that, if falsehood assails Truth, Truth can assail falsehood.”1 This sentence succinctly intertwines two constant and essential strands of Newman’s thought about Christian education: first, the duty of Christians to respond forcefully to the infidelity that was emerging in his day—though many of his contemporaries seemed oblivious to, or complacent about,its existence;second,the need for Christians to be trained for this challenging task—for which they would need the best education possible so that they would be competent not only professionally, but also theologically, to respond to attacks against the Faith. If anything, the infidelity that was “nascent” in Newman’s day has become pervasive in the twenty-first century, when Christians often find themselves on the defensive because of their belief. Yet Christians today should and “can speak out”— but to do so effectively, they need both stature in their professional field and theological competence in expressing their faith. Without such stature and competence, Christian witness is likely to be a modern instance of “sounding brass and tinkling cymbal” (1 Corinthians 13:1)—if charity is mandatory for an effective presentation of the Christian gospel in the modern world, so too is credibility:Truth must “assail falsehood” with a cogent apologetics based on both reason and faith. Such was the motivation behind Newman’s educational endeavors to educate a laity for Christian witness in the modern world. The five essays in this issue of Newman Studies Journal address various aspects of Newman’s educational ideal of preparing the laity for the task of presenting the Christian Truth in a world that is often hostile to Faith. CONTENTS The first essay by William J. Kelly, which traces the development of Newman’s thought about the role of the laity in the Church, emphasizes that it is impossible to separate the events of Newman’s life from his teaching on the role of the laity. John 1 John Henry Newman,“A Form of Infidelity of the Day”(Part 2, University Subjects, Essay V), in The Idea of a University (available at:http://www.newmanreader.org/works/idea/article5.html),381–404,at 382; this essay was originally published as “On the nascent infidelity of the day” in The Catholic University Gazette 1 (21 December 1854): 236–240, (28 December 1854): 236–248; for bibliographical information, see Vincent Ferrer Blehl, John Henry Newman: A Bibliographical Catalogue of His Writings (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978), 41. Newman Journal V9 Issue 1_Newman Journal V9 Issue 1 2/1/12 10:12 AM Page 3 NEWMAN STUDIES JOURNAL 4 D. Love’s essay then considers the way that Newman employed rhetoric in his Apologia as a method of proclaiming the Gospel and defending the Catholic Faith. The next two essays treat complementary aspects of Newman’s educational thought: Stephen Morgan shows how the views that Newman expressed about education in The Idea of a University could only have originated in the Oxford of his day; Joseph Horton then explores Newman’s vision of the residential college as being the place of educational formation at the collegiate level. The fifth essay by Cyril O’Regan examines Newman’s life-long campaign against liberal religion’s “anti-holiness principle” that rejects the Christian commitment to the pursuit of sanctity; Newman attacked the underlying presuppositions of this principle, particularly its naturalistic anthropology and its “anthropocentric horizon of discourse,” as well as its rejection of ascetic discipline and its tendency to accept uncritically what is intellectually novel. The book section, which opens with Donald Graham’s critique of the late Frank M. Turner’s revisionist biography, John Henry Newman: The Challenge to Evangelical Religion, includes three reviews of aspects of Newman’s thought about, respectively, the nature of the mind, theology in the...