Welcome back to the Word on Fire show.

I'm Dr. Matthew Patrusick, Senior Director of the Word on Fire Institute and the host of the

Word on Fire show. Thank you, as always, for joining us.

Friends, in honor of St. John Henry Newman's recently being named a doctor of the church,

we're bringing you Bishop Barron's entire Word on Fire Institute lecture series on John Henry Newman.

Throughout these next several weeks, we'll dive deep into one of Bishop Barron's spiritual and intellectual heroes.

As always, enjoy.

So we're continuing now with our analysis

of the wonderful essay on the development

of Christian doctrine, written at the midpoint

of Newman's life and career.

We've seen this idea of the unfolding

of a notion or concept over space and time. It takes time and it takes

the play of lively minds for an idea to display itself fully. And in fact, a real idea is never

exhausted. It might take us all of space and time fully to understand an idea.

This also allows Newman to overcome what he takes to be a more Protestant prejudice

in favor of going back to the beginning. So I know there's something attractive about this.

If you use the image of, let's say, a cluttered house, let's get rid of the clutter in this house. Let's get rid of the layers of wallpaper and bad paint and try to restore it to what it once was. So I get it. There's something valuable about that. Or, you know, to typically modern image,

you find it in Descartes, is if a city has become kind of rickety and overgrown and dangerous and

winding streets, why don't we just knock all that down and restore a kind of harmony, symmetry,

and order to the city? It happened, by the way, in Paris, didn't it, the 19th century? When a kind of harmony, symmetry, and order to the city. It happened, by the way, in Paris,

didn't it, the 19th century? When a lot of medieval Paris was knocked down, all that remains is,

...