Candidate for promotion …

…Cardinal Newman: Saint, Theologian, Prose Stylist - The Catholic Thing. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

By the time he wrote the Apologia, Newman had pruned his style of its spectacular elements ….  If you come to the Apologia after just having read the Idea of a University, as I first did years ago, you may be disappointed by the lack of fireworks.  The whole thing is written in black and white and shades of gray, not in Technicolor.  How drab it all seems at first.  But stay with it a while, grow accustomed to its melody, and you soon realize you’re in the presence of another prose masterpiece, though a masterpiece of a very different kind.