On October 5, 2025, our own NINS co-founder Catharine Ryan was invited to give a sermon at St. Mary's University Church in Oxford, at the same pulpit from which John Henry Newman preached 200 years prior.
On 12 September 1830 Newman preached a sermon in the University Church entitled “Jeremiah, A Lesson for the Disappointed.” It has not, so far as I am aware, ever attracted a great deal of attention. Though it was later published in Parochial and Plain Sermons—“the most important publication not only of Newman’s Protestant days, but of his life,” as Owen Chadwick once averred—it had to wait til volume eight for inclusion: hardly typical of “The Very Best Of …” territory.
That is fitting in a way, however. For the whole topic of “Jeremiah, A Lesson for the Disappointed” is the fact of being overlooked, of deserving recognition but not getting it, of striving and failing—or rather, of seeming to fail.
The cumulative effect of the theological debates at Oxford, together with his pastoral experience and personal reflections, gradually led Newman to a more high church ecclesiological approach, especially on visibility, invisibility, and apostolicity of the church.
Newman tended to talk about wealth and commerce in two ways: one prophetic and denunciatory, particularly of nations of shopkeepers, and one with applause—this is the nation of free enterprise.
Recently, a friend and I realized over a beer that we did not know what a good confession looked like. We had seen good (and bad) Masses; we had witnessed the efficacious baptism and confirmation.
