An Aristocracy of Exalted Spirits:
The Idea of the Church in Newman's Tamworth Reading Room
$25.00
In ‘An Aristocracy of Exalted Spirits’, the first book-length study of John Henry Newman’s Tamworth Reading Room, David P: Delio offers a new framework for understanding this highly original work of satire, politics, and theology. In February 1841 John Henry Newman responded in The Times of London to an address given by the leading Conservative politician, Sir Robert Peel, who was to become prime minister of the United Kingdom for a second time later that year. Newman assumed the penname Catholicus and composed seven letters woven together by theological and philosophical themes. These themes coalesced into Newman’s ‘idea’ of the Church which contested an errant view, argued by Peel and others, that science and education divorced from the Church provided an alternate means to human fulfillment.
This original study traces the intertwined histories of Peel and Newman and the background and consequences of the letters, while showing how Newman’s ecclesiology was at the heart of his project. The drama surrounding the Tamworth Reading Room helps to complete a picture of the Church and of a Christian trying to negotiate an emerging democratic, scientific, and industrial nineteenth century. This story is still with us today over fifty years from the Second Vatican Council, forty from Lausanne, through the Lambeth Conferences and other ecclesial movements. A return to the Tamworth Reading Room, an oft forgotten work, may help the Church negotiate the perils and promise of the third millennium.
You can also find Dave's essays in Saint John Henry Newman : Preserving and Promulgating His Legacy, edited by Robert Christie (pictured on the right)
and in "A “Multitude of Subtle Influences”: Faith, Reason, and Conversion in Newman’s Thirteenth Oxford University Sermon" and ""Calculated to Undermine Things Established”: Newman’s Fourteenth Oxford University Sermon" published in The New Studies Journal, Volume 5, Numbers 1 and 2 respectively (pictured on the left).
The Benedict Proposal:
Church as Creative Minority in the Thought of Pope Benedict XVI
$19.00
How ought the church respond to the rise of a post-Christian secular age? Should it retreat? What is the mission of the church in this context? Joseph Ratzinger’s eucharistic ecclesiology provides a model for living the relation between communion and mission, a model that provides a sound image for conceiving of and imagining the church’s engagement with modernity and the embodiment of missionary communion. Ratzinger’s vision, deeply influenced by St. Benedict’s and St. Augustine’s responses to the problems of their day, offers a theologically and liturgically grounded vision of missionary communion that transcends politics. In light of our creation by, from, and for the triune God, authentic responses to the present dis-integration of reason and community require the witness and invitation of the church as a community for the world. Ratzinger argues that right worship can and does habituate Christians and equip churches to respond to the existential questions confronting modern persons, many of whom seem partially paralyzed by the anxieties of life without truth and communion. Might the witness of communion for mission lived by the new ecclesial movements, especially the Focolare, offer an example of how Ratzinger’s creative minorities can successfully evangelize this secular age?
Josh has also published "The Dorothy Option? Dorothy, Benedict and the
Future of the Church", a chapter in Dorothy Day and the Church: Past, Present, and Future, edited by Lance Richey and Adam Deville (pictured on the right) and "Pure Means for Yesterday and Tomorrow: The Catholic Worker Embodiment of Maritain’s Prophetic Shock-Minorities" a chapter in In Search of Harmony: Metaphysics and Politics, edited by James Hanink (pictured on the left)