
released 2/21/2025
In this 2016 lecture, Dr. John F. Crosby explores key personalist insights found in the thinking of John Henry Newman and Romano Guardini. After a brief look at some varieties of personalism — each of which is opposed to a particular evil — Crosby discusses Newman’s particular resistance against the pretensions of extreme rationalism. Newman distinguished between nominal and real assent, arguing that real apprehension of an idea or a person not only satisfies reason but “makes the human heart expand.” Guardini’s contributions to personalism included the insight that we need to recover, or recollect, ourselves so we can be present to ourselves, to God, and to one another. Crosby also explains Guardini’s thoughts on how one life profoundly influences another and on how God honors and respects us as persons.
This lecture is provided courtesy of The Hildebrand Project. The full title of the lecture is “Fundamental Ideas of Personalism: John Henry Newman and Romano Guardini.”
The entire text of Newman’s sermon mentioned by Ken in his opening remarks to this Feature may be found here.
60 minutes
PREVIEW
The full-length track for this audio is only available to paid members and to listeners with a free Visitor’s Pass. If you are a member, log in here. If you would like a Visitor’s Pass, sign in here. You may purchase one of our complete memberships here. Happy listening!
Related reading and listening
- The transforming power of false divinities — Romano Guardini on the danger of becoming like the gods we invent
- A richer, deeper view of human dignity —
FROM VOL. 98 Moral philosopher Gilbert Meilaender examines the question of human dignity and its place within political discourse. (25 minutes) - What it means to be a person —
FROM VOL. 147 Sociologist Craig Gay argues that in order to address the challenges of a technological approach to the world, we need to recover the Christian tradition’s robust theology of personhood. (24 minutes) - “A sign of contradiction” — In this lecture, Daniel Gibbons compares and contrasts understandings of sacramental poetics proposed by Augustine, Aquinas, and Sydney. (36 minutes)
- Nature’s intelligibility — In this lecture, Christopher Blum argues that scientists need to regain a full appreciation of nature’s intelligibility, as they are apt to lose sight of reality due to the reductionism produced by their theories. (31 minutes)
- Submission to mathematical truth — In this lecture, Carlo Lancellotti argues that integration of the moral, cognitive, and aesthetic aspects of mathematics is needed in a robust liberal arts mathematics curriculum. (25 minutes)
- A prophetic “wake-up call” — In this 2024 lecture honoring the bicentennial of George MacDonald’s birth, Malcolm Guite explores MacDonald’s power to awaken readers’ spirits and effect in them a change of consciousness. (59 minutes)
- What is lost with labor-saving devices — Romano Guardini on what is lost when cultural pursuits eclipse natural order
- Faith that is more than “chemically pure” — Romano Guardini on sustaining a Christian understanding of all of Creation
- Embodied knowledge —
FROM VOL. 121 James K. A. Smith advocates for a return to some pre-modern conceptualizations of the human body. (18 minutes) - Touch’d with a coal from heav’n — Daniel Ritchie finds in the poetry of William Cowper (1731–1800) an anticipation of Michael Polanyi’s epistemology
- How we know the world — Daniel Ritchie argues that poet and hymnodist William Cowper was ahead of his time in critiquing the Enlightenment’s reductionist view of knowledge. (16 minutes)
- William Cowper: Reconciling the Heart with the Head — Daniel E. Ritchie discusses the life and work of poet William Cowper (1731–1800), comparing his commitment to understanding reality through personal knowledge, intuition, and rigorous contemplation with the thought of Michael Polanyi. (43 minutes)
- Approaches to knowing —
FROM VOL. 104 Daniel Ritchie describes how many of the figures he studies in his new book emphasize the significance of human experience, enculturation, and contingency to human knowledge. (21 minutes) - Recovering the primacy of contemplation — Augusto Del Noce finds in St. Augustine resources to diagnose the fatal flaw in progressivism
- The integration of theoretical and mythic intelligence —
FROM VOL. 156 William C. Hackett discusses the relationships between philosophy and theology, and of both to the meaning embedded in myth. (29 minutes) - The historian’s communal role as storyteller —
FROM VOL. 127 Historian Christopher Shannon discusses how American academic historical writing presents a grand narrative of progressivism, which it defends by subscribing to an orthodoxy of objective Reason. (21 minutes) - Universities as the hosts of reciprocating speech — Robert Jenson on how the Christian understanding of Truth in a personal Word shaped the Western university
- The ecstasy of the act of knowing — Theologian Paul Griffiths situates our creaturely knowing within the framework of the relation between God and Creation
- On The Abolition of Man —
FROM VOL. 154 Michael Ward explains why The Abolition of Man is one of Lewis’s most important but also most difficult books. (36 minutes) - The Life was the Light of men — In a lecture from 2018, Ken Myers contrasts the Enlightenment’s understanding of reason with the Christocentric conception of reason. (57 minutes)
- In the image of our devices? — In light of the history of the meaning of intellectus, D. C. Schindler questions the use of the word “intelligence” to describe systems employing large language models. (18 minutes)
- The aboriginal Vicar of Christ, the voice of God in the heart of Man — Reinhard Hütter on John Henry Newman’s insistence that conscience — rightly formed — bears witness to the law of God
- Conscience and its counterfeits — A 2014 lecture by theologian Reinhard Hütter examines “Freedom of Conscience as Freedom in the Truth: Conscience according to Thomas Aquinas and John Henry Newman.” (64 minutes)
- Christology and human relationality — Joseph Ratzinger on how the longing for eternity expressed in human love is an analogue of Trinitarian love
- Maintaining a connected grasp of things — Ian Ker summarizes the central concern of John Henry Newman’s educational philosophy as developed in The Idea of a University
- The university and the unity of knowledge — Biographer Ian Ker discusses John Henry Newman’s understanding the goal of “mental cultivation.” (17 minutes)
- On Earth as it is in Heaven —
FROM VOL. 108 Hans Boersma — author of Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry — explains why Christians should reject the modern separation of Heaven and Earth and recover a “sacramental ontology.” (26 minutes) - A.I., power, control, & knowledge — Ken Myers shares some paragraphs from Langdon Winner‘s seminal book, Autonomous Technology: Technics-out-of-Control as a Theme in Political Thought (1977) and from Roger Shattuck‘s Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography (1996). An interview with Shattuck is also presented. (31 minutes)
- Deconstructing the myths of modernity — In order to counter modernity’s fragmentation, Paul Tyson argues that we must recover a foundation of reality based on meaning and being. (35 minutes)
- Health and personhood — Dr. Kimbell Kornu explains how the training of medical professionals should be shaped by a recognition of a Christian understanding of personhood. (22 minutes)
- Is irrational freedom truly freedom? — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger argues that freedom must be understood in the context of interplay of reason and the will
- Teachers and Learners — Ian Ker shares John Henry Newman’s ideals of learning, and Mark Schwehn discusses the virtues of good teachers. (27 minutes)
- Remembering the networks of giving and receiving — O. Carter Snead on the disabling assumptions of expressive individualism in public bioethics
- Beauty, here and beyond — John F. Crosby on Dietrich von Hildebrand’s Aesthetics and his description of the mysterious signals of transcendence present in earthly beauty
- The story of the demotion of stories — Malcolm Guite on the Enlightenment’s rash dismissal of poetic knowledge
- Healthy habits of mind — Scott Newstok describes how many efforts at educational reform have become obstacles to thinking well, and he offers a rich and evocative witness to a better way of understanding what thinking is. (20 minutes)
- Knowledge transformed by love — David K. Naugle on the reordered thinking of the redeemed
- Questioning the world’s assumptions down to their very roots — John Milbank on the need for a more robust apologetics
- Cosmology without God — Modern science is practiced in the context of beliefs that are intrinsically metaphysical and theological, even though practitioners of science claim (and usually genuinely believe) that their disciplines are philosophically neutral. David Alcalde challenges such claims within a sub-field of astrophysics. (21 minutes)
- Dallas Willard on discipleship — Dallas Willard talks about how pastors should understand their vocation as one of making disciples — apprentices of Jesus — and that the training of pastors must include a commitment to pursue spiritual wisdom and faithfulness. (21 minutes)
- Reasoning about values — Revisiting a 1974 text that examined the mutual animosities of the 1960s
- The religion of the Logos — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger on acknowledging the Source of rationality
- Guarding our tongues — John Henry Newman on the manner of speech fitting for Christian faithfulness
- Carelessly invoking “science” in the pandemic — Historian of science Steven Shapin talks about about how the authority of “science” has been invoked by many political authorities during the pandemic, yet how scientific pursuits are deeply human endeavors. (18 minutes)
- Stephen Gurney: “John Henry Newman: The Poetics of Devotion” — Stephen Gurney shows how in his sermons, John Henry Newman draws the listener in through the craft and beauty of his prose while nonetheless removing himself from the spotlight in order to convey his listeners to the True Presence of Christ. (51 minutes)
- Shyness: How normal behavior became a sickness — Christopher Lane examines the prejudice in favor of gregariousness which led to the medicalizing of reticence and reserve. Then Ken Myers shares Romano Guardini‘s thoughts about sustaining a centered interiority. (16 minutes)
- Glorious Abasement: John Betz on the Prophetic Critique of J. G. Hamann — Theologian John Betz discusses the eighteenth-century philosopher and translator, Johann Georg Hamann, critic and contemporary of Immanuel Kant and other prominent figures of the German Enlightenment. (54 minutes)
- Recovering the meaning of reason — James Peters discusses how Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Pascal, and many others understood the nature and purpose of reason quite differently from the common modern understanding. Also, D. C. Schindler explains how consciousness and reason necessarily involve reaching outside of ourselves. (24 minutes)
- Mars Hill Audio Journal, Volume 144 — FEATURED GUESTS: Jonathan Mcintosh, Kevin Vost, Malcolm Guite, R. David Cox, Grant Brodrecht, and Peter Bouteneff