Report on Cardinal Newman Day Lecture

Since I promoted my presentation at Newman University here on my blog, I thought I should report on it to you. Overall, I was happy with the results (my little jokes worked). The turnout was small, but it was Ash Wednesday evening after all. Good question and answer after. My husband took the picture above before everyone/anyone arrived. We worked on positioning the lapel microphone so I did not have to use the podium mic, which required me speaking directly into it--or my voice dropped. It's so important to get those little things right to reduce distractions. I will submit, after some edits, "Blessed John Henry Newman and Lent: Affliction and Love" for publication in Archaeopteryx, The Newman Journal of Ideas.

My next projects include a presentation on St. Thomas More at the Spiritual Life Center here in Wichita on Saturday, May 2 during the run of Wolf Hall on PBS, an article on the same subject for a major Catholic publication and a couple of radio interviews. I'll keep you updated. I also have some reviews/articles to work on for The Christian Review. Thanks again for your interest and support.

Blessed John Henry Newman, pray for us!

Two Weeks From Today: Cardinal Newman Lecture

If my Cardinal Newman lecture is only two weeks from today, then you are only two weeks away from the beginning of Lent!

I'll be speaking at Newman University on Ash Wednesday at 7:30 p.m. in the Dugan-Gorges Conference Center.

More information will be coming very soon but here is a link to information on the Newman University website.

My topic is Newman and the Liturgy: Affliction and Love in Lent. It is based mostly upon his Parochial and Plain Sermons, but also on his Catholic homilies and his life and spirituality.

Mass for Ash Wednesday with the imposition of ashes will follow my presentation at 9:00 p.m. in St. John's Chapel inside Sacred Heart Hall.

My talk is all typed out--now it's just practice, practice, practice!

New Project: 2015 Cardinal Newman Lecture

I'm preparing for Lent and it isn't even Advent yet?!

John McCormick, Director of the Gerber Institute of Catholic Studies at Newman University has asked me to deliver the 2015 Cardinal Newman Week lecture on Ash Wednesday, February 18, 2015, and of course, I've accepted. The title and the description are:

Blessed John Henry Newman on Lent: Affliction and Love

Blessed John Henry Newman was the greatest homilist in nineteenth century England. As an Anglican vicar and as a Catholic priest he prepared his homilies in harmony with the liturgical year, urging his congregations to strive for holiness in every season. In this year's Cardinal Newman Day lecture, local author Stephanie A. Mann will explore Newman's homilies for Lent with their emphasis both on affliction or self-denial and devotion to Jesus in His Passion and Death. Mann will also describe how Newman "practiced what he preached" with examples from his life and personal devotions.

So I'm reading several sermons on Lent from Newman's Parochial and Plain Sermons, outlining my presentation, and gathering other sources. What a great opportunity!

Actually, I've done this before: When I worked as an Admissions Counselor at then Kansas Newman College after graduation from Wichita State University, I delivered the Cardinal Newman Day lecture on Monday, February 21, 1983. My topic: "The Rambler Crisis".

Newman and Liturgy: From Anglican to Catholic

My friend Annie sent me this link to a lecture on “Marvellous Disclosures”: John Henry Newman’s Anglican Reflections on the Liturgy:

Over fifty years ago, as he reflected on the legacy of John Henry Newman, Fr Frank O’Malley asked: “What was the spirit of this man who is with us a constant reference and a standard and a sign?” By way of an answer, he pointed to something that few Newman scholars before or since have sought to highlight:

the spirit of Newman moved within the spirit of the liturgy, the liturgy thought of in its most significant sense as the very rhythm of Christian existence, stirred and centred by the life of Christ. Newman absorbed the liturgical character of existence. He lived by the liturgy. 

It was as an Anglican that “the liturgical character of existence” first impressed itself upon Newman. On the eve of his fourteenth birthday his mother made him a gift of The Book of Common Prayer – or would have done had he not preempted her offer by buying the book himself for her to give to him, which she then did “without saying a word”, bemused no doubt by her “impatient headstrong” boy. From the time of his ordination he preached regularly on the importance of the sacraments and the indispensability of public prayer, eventually coming to believe that the Church’s public prayer was the means through which the Church is visibly manifested in time and space. And during the early years of the Oxford Movement he came to regard the Prayer Book as the depository of Apostolic teaching in England, and a sure sign that the Anglican Communion belonged to and expressed the Catholic Faith – a belief he would gradually question.

Newman was known to celebrate the services of the Church with great care and devotion, and to encourage the faithful to attend them regularly, believing (as Donald Withey writes) “the daily office and frequent celebration of communion to be of the essence of the life of the Church”. “Religious worship”, Newman would assert, “supplies all our spiritual need...[and] suits every mood of mind and variety of circumstance”. At Littlemore, as Pusey recounted in 1837, during parts of the Daily Service Newman followed the ancient practice of kneeling “towards the East, the same way as the congregation, turning to the congregation in the parts directed to them”, though he always retained the protestant practice of celebrating the Sunday Communion at the north end of the holy table. Although he was not principally concerned with ritualism, he had a great appreciation for the importance of outward forms of public prayer and the liturgical cycle whose yearly round impressed the “great revealed verities” of the Faith onto the memories and imaginations of the faithful.

The liturgy inspired and shaped Newman’s preaching. An obvious example of this is that the sanctoral and seasonal cycle of the liturgical year became the organizing principle of Volume Two of the Parochial Sermons, first published in 1835. Despite the sermons having been written over many years, Newman arranged them not in the order in which they were written but according to their place in the liturgical calendar. In doing so he situated the volume in an Anglican tradition of liturgically ordered works that includes George Herbert’s The Temple (1633), Robert Nelson’s Companion for the Fasts and Festivals of the Church of England (1704), Charles Wheatly’s A Rational Illustration Upon the Book of Common Prayer (1710), and John Keble’s The Christian Year (1827). Beyond the liturgical arrangement of Volume Two, Newman’s sermons more generally reflect, as Placid Murray writes, the “range of Christian feeling aroused by the mysteries of Christ’s life as commemorated in the liturgy”.

Read the rest there. Turns out my receiving this was most timely, because I've just been asked to give the annual Cardinal Newman lecture at Newman University next year on Ash Wednesday, February 18 (before Mass that evening) on the theme of Newman and Lent. I'm working on the title and the blurb, but you can be sure the lecture will be based on Newman's sermons for the season of Lent.

2014 Newman Lecture in Wichita, Kansas

During the week around Blessed John Henry Newman's birthday on February 21, Newman University hosts its annual Cardinal Newman Week, with a presentation, alumni and development events, Mass, and High Tea. The speaker this year is Professor Kevin Godfrey from Alvernia University, a Franciscan university in Reading, Pennsylvania.

According to Newman University's website:

Alvernia University theology professor Kevin Godfrey will be the featured presenter at the Gerber Institute-sponsored Cardinal Newman Lecture on Tuesday, February 18 at 4 pm in the Dugan-Gorges Conference Center on the campus of Newman University. The lecture, part of Newman University’s annual celebration of Cardinal Newman Week in honor of its namesake, is free and open to the public.

Professor Godfrey’s lecture is titled “John Henry Newman on the Mind’s Ability to Know God: The Knowledge-Generating Interplay of Imagination, Conscience and Prayer.”

Abstract: At age fifteen, John Henry Newman (1801-1890) became convinced that it is possible for the human mind to know God and to do so with the ultimate conviction of certitude. From that youthful insight and for the rest of his life Newman struggled to understand and express the deeper epistemological significance of that life-altering, adolescent experience. His understanding of how the mind works to know God is one of the compelling topics that he thought about endlessly. This presentation will introduce Newman’s ideas about knowing God. It will also share reflections about teaching and learning based on Newman’s insights about knowing God.

Biography: Dr. Kevin Godfrey has published articles and delivered scholarly papers at national and international conferences on topics in Historical Theology and Christian Spirituality. His main areas of interest for research are the Franciscan Tradition and the theology of John Henry Cardinal Newman. He has served as convener and moderator of the Thought of John Henry Newman Group of the Catholic Theological Society of America for the past seven years.