Family matters …

… Heart to Heart | America Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The chapter devoted to Newman’s relationship and correspondence with his nephew, John Rickards Mozley, sums up the tension between Victorian society’s fading religious inheritance and its growing materialism and rationalism. The outcome, in Newman’s eyes, was to dull the “pied beauty,” to flatten the multidimensional nature of reality. His counterstrategy was not a retreat from the world, but an untiring effort to articulate and evoke a sacramental vision: a vivid sense of “real presences.” For Newman all hints and intimations find their fulfillment in Christ’s eucharistic presence. And, though he may not have succeeded with his brothers or nephew, many, like the Jesuit priest and poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, drew enduring inspiration from Newman’s vision and witness.