ABSTRACT
Newman's dedication to teaching religion, both as a pastor and a scholar, resulted in a plethora of publications that remain challenging a century later. Religious insight had occurred in Newman's two conversion experiences. As a teenager of fifteen, his first conversion was deeply emotional. Impressed by the Calvinistic and the Evangelical writings of his day, his lack of clear religious convictions shifted to an affective awareness of the divine presence in his life. But his second conversion, to Catholicism thirty years later in 1845, was discerned in a more rational way. He decided to take the path to Rome as a result of his historical analysis of doctrinal development down the Christian centuries. When Newman lectured on the identity of a university in 1854 his pastoral, educational, and theological concerns for religious truth were inseparable. Newman's defence of dogma can be easily misconstrued as an outright appeal to ecclesial authority.
