Introduction to a Giant

Of the making of anthologies there is no end. Some are collections of great essays from the past, some collections of papers from conferences or perhaps solicited pieces in honor of a living or recently deceased scholar and centered around a general theme, while some are meant to be capacious treatments of the different aspects of a particular question or the thought of a particular writer. A Guide to John Henry Newman: His Life and Thought is in the last category. Similar to the Cambridge Companion to John Henry Newman and Oxford Handbook of John Henry Newman, both done in the last 15 years, it is perhaps more like the former insofar as many of the chapters are less in the “scientific” mold of historiographic scholarship and more in the mode of very good introductory chapters to Newman’s thought. Like the latter, however, it is a doorstop volume that aims more at being comprehensive, though not entirely so—there are no chapters on Newman’s fiction, for instance.