(5) Regarding Newman in our personal lives before
now, my wife says that she
read him for an education course in college. She also
professes to be grateful that
she met her future husband (me) in 1961 at a Newman Club
function at the
University of Texas at Austin: a Christmas party for
Catholic Graduate students.
Newman was more important to me, but not overwhelmingly
so, during the past four
decades. In high school I read APOLOGIA PRO VITA SUA
. In college I heard a
choir performing excerpts from Edward Elgar’s rendering
of THE DREAM OF
GERONTIUS. For an undergraduate degree in secondary
education I read THE
IDEA OF A UNIVERSITY. While writing a Master’s
thesis in philosophy on the
principle of causality, I pondered Newman’s “illative
sense” in A GRAMMAR OF ASSENT. Until late last year I never
again read him at length again. His name
popped up in books or articles about Great Victorians,
the Second Vatican Council
and otherwise. I would then tell myself that I really
ought to allot some serious time to
the good Cardinal. Now I am doing so. |