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Newman’s Apologetics of the Imagination

Oct 31, 2019
Swift Hall, 3rd Floor Lecture
1025 E 58th St.
Chicago, IL 60637
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This event was cosponsored by the Nicholson Center for British Studies.

John Henry Newman famously insisted that "the heart is commonly reached not through the reason, but through the imagination."  As a theologian, apologist, and the 19th century's most famous convert, Newman was keenly attentive to the foundations of religious belief.  His apologetic career is, in some sense, an appeal to the imagination in contradistinction to the prevailing empiricism of Locke and Hume.  In his novels, sermons, lectures, and even his philosophical magnum opus, the Grammar of Assent, Newman defends an understanding of the imagination that harmonizes religious faith and rational inquiry.