ABSTRACT
This chapter enlists John Henry Newman to make the case that recent generational developments, often described as disaffiliation or post-denominationalism, still put comparative theologians in an epistemologically advantageous position to teach religion and theology to contemporary students. From his early sermons through to his mature works, Newman's intellectual approach is suffused, more or less explicitly, with some form of his distinction between 'real' and 'notional'. The chapter explores how Newman uses his categories of 'notional' and 'real' to qualify what he calls 'apprehension' and 'assent'. Newman's explicit explanation of this distinction appears in A Grammar of Assent. Contemporary students are increasingly less likely to have serious commitment to any particular religious tradition from which they return enriched to their home tradition. The chapter offers a preliminary and necessarily limited statistical sketch of a twenty-first-century classroom. It explains how the discipline of comparative theology might adapt to millennial classrooms and in the process, change and develop.
