The challenges facing Catholic higher education today offer the Church an opportunity to rethink the conceptual framework within which it operates. The educational vision found in the relevant writings of Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman, Pope John Paul II, and Pope Benedict XVI offer possibilities for an educational project centered on the role…

During and after the Financial Crisis of 2008, many institutions of higher learning have had revenue and budgetary reductions, forcing them to make severe university budget cuts and university reductions in force. Often the university cuts are preceded by a process of evaluation of academic programs where institutions determine what they stand for…

There is a personal, human element to liberal education, what john Henry Newman once called the "living voice, the breathing form, the expressive countenance" Those who cherish personalized instruction would benefit from a phrase to defend and promote the practice. Author Scott Newstok proposes in this article that we begin calling it…

This essay consists of an examination of the work of three thinkers who conceive of liberal education primarily in teleological terms, and, implicitly if not explicitly, attempt to offer some answer to the question: what does it mean to be fully human? John Henry Newman, T. S. Eliot, and Josef Pieper developed their understanding of liberal…

This project interprets how John Henry Newman's (1801-1890) system of thought informs the philosophical and theoretical grounds for rhetorical praxis in the marketplace. His seminal lessons in "An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent" (1870) and "The Idea of a University" (1873 ed.) demonstrate the metaphoric power of words…

The situation of the Christian college in an age of heightened educational competition, economic stress, and cultural pluralism is discussed. It is suggested that the task confronting the Christian colleges today is the achievement of excellence in both piety, learning, and educational service. After considering the fundamentals of Christian…

John Henry Newman provided the basic vocabulary and guiding rationale sustaining the ideal of a liberal education up to our day. He highlighted its central focus on the cultivation of the intellect, its reliance upon broadly based theoretical knowledge, its independence of moral and religious stipulations, and its being its own end. As new…

Asserts that student learning is strongly influenced by interaction with faculty, and suggests that John Henry Newman's experience of intellectual community in the faculty common room at Oriel College in Oxford serves as a model for faculty renewal. Suggests that any revision of the general education curriculum necessarily calls for the renewal of…

If John Henry Newman were to publish a blueprint for liberal education here in the United States and now in the twenty-first century, what would he call it? Many aspects of higher education have changed since 1852, the date of his "Idea of a University," and the U.S. is not Britain. In this essay, the author contends that Newman's work still…

John Henry Newman, Leo Strauss, and Michael Oakeshott do not share an identical "idea of the university." Strauss and Oakeshott do not, for instance, ascribe to religion the elevated role that Newman had judged crucial for it in education. But, as Timothy Fuller shows in this essay, all three resisted the portents of what afflicts academe today.…

Recurrent themes in selected literature on American higher education written during 1962-1972 are analyzed and related to themes on the same subject addressed by selected Victorian essayists in 19th century England. Parallels in educational thought are used to illuminate some aspects of the nature of the debate over the role of higher education in…

This book presents four major articles and 10 brief book reviews concerning the liberal arts in higher education. An introduction by the editors, "Liberal Education: Initiating the Conversation," precedes the articles. The articles are: (1) "The Classical Liberal Arts Tradition" (Christopher Flannery and Rae Wineland Newstad); (2) "Modern and…

The significance of the foundations of education approach to teaching is apparent in the ideas of John Henry Newman, Karl Jaspers, Jose Ortega y Gasset, and Mortimer Adler. Newman maintained that there is a circle of knowledge and once this unity is ignored the result is distortion in the learners and in the knowledge. To retain the whole, the…