Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (Hardback or Cased Book)

Newman, John Henry Cardinal

ISBN 10: 0268036136 / ISBN 13: 9780268036133

Published by University of Notre Dame Press 5/15/2015, 2015

About this Item

Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert.

Seller Inventory # BBS-9780268036133

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Loss and Gain: The Story of a Convert (Hardback or Cased Book)
• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press 5/15/2015
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0268036136
• ISBN 13: 9780268036133
• Binding: Hardback or Cased Book
• Condition: New
• Weight: 1.15 pounds
• Book Type: Book

About this title

Synopsis

It may seem surprising to discover that a Catholic cardinal was a novelist, and Newman advanced this as an obstacle to his own canonization: "Saints are not literary men," he wrote, "they do not love the classics, they do not write Tales." He was only fit "to black the saints' shoes―if Saint Philip uses blacking, in heaven."

The background to Loss and Gain was a controversial one. Newman wrote the book in part to provide a title for publication by James Burns, of the later celebrated firm of Burns and Oates, who had lost his stable of Anglican authors by converting in 1847 to Catholicism.

An understanding of the novel requires some knowledge of its Oxford background, of the university setting, which was compared in the fierceness of its loyalties by Newman's friend Richard Church to a Renaissance Italian city, implying an assassin with a stiletto round every corner. In short, there is a sense in which, in spite of its fictional character, Loss and Gain is a work of controversy, full of echoes of old battles over whether the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion and the Book of Common Prayer should be interpreted in a "Catholic" or a "Protestant" sense. It is a response, like Newman's other works, to a challenge, and so its hero, Charles Reding, as a student in Oxford, passes through the hands of the representatives of a number of Anglican parties and schools of theology before resolving his doubts in Rome.

About the Authors

British theologian John Henry Cardinal Newman (1801-1890) was a leading figure in both the Church of England and, after his conversion, the Roman Catholic Church and was known as "The Father of the Second Vatican Council." His Parochial and Plain Sermons (1834-42) is considered the best collection of sermons in the English language. He is also the author of A Grammar of Assent (1870).

Sheridan Gilley is an Emeritus Reader in Theology at the University of Durham, an Honorary Fellow in Catholic History in its Catholic Studies Centre, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and past president (2010–2011) of the Ecclesiastical History Society. Author of many books, many on Newman, he has published more than two hundred articles on modern English and Irish and Christian history.