ABOUT

I am the Assistant Catholic Chaplain at Warwick University and Assistant Priest at St Joseph the Worker Church in Canley, Coventry. I taught at Oscott College Seminary (affiliated to KUL, Leuven) for almost twenty years, and obtained my FHEA while Chaplain at Aston University where l underwent a lecturing qualification. I went to KUL for post-graduate studies STL (1990-1992).

RESEARCH

I study the letters and diaries of John Henry Newman, the Victorian Anglican clergyman who, after his conversion in 1845, became a Catholic priest. He was canonized in 2019. I write creatively about Newman’s humanity, using the hermeneutic for interpreting a saint’s life he recommends in his Fragment of the life of Saint Philip (1853). This methodology was, he said, so that alongside a saint’s heroic deeds, they can be appreciated, more fully, as “living and breathing“ people with “peculiarities of habit, feeling and opinion”-rather than “bloodless ideality.” Newman humorously explains: “To find a saint sitting down to cards, or reading a heathen author, or listening to music, or taking snuff, is often a relief and encouragement to the reader, as convincing him that Grace does not supersede nature”. These, “lights and shades” he says, “while not directly and immediately spiritual” are necessary for “understanding what a Saint is.”

Newman’s vast correspondence (over 20,000 letters) and diaries are full of such personal details which shed light on his distinctive character and pastoral attributes. These aspects reveal how he could relate to people, from all walks of life, so effectively. His humanity is seldom explored by scholars and I begin to address this lacunae in my book Newman a Human Harp of Many Chords (Alive Publishing (2019).

I also research Newman’s teaching about the nature of his own grief and that of others; and am affiliated to the Comparative Religions and Literatures group in English.

PUBLICATIONS