Sectarianism and Orestes Brownson in the American Religious Marketplace

ISBN-13: 9783319847672 / Angielski / Miękka / 2018 / 178 str.

Angel Cortes

Spis treści

Prologue

Chapter One: An Age of ‘Crisis and Discontinuity’: Brownson’s Early Religious Confusion & Mobility

Chapter Two: ‘A Sea of Sectarian Rivalries’: The Second Great Awakening & Religious Conflict 

Chapter Three: ‘I Am Slave to No Sect’: Defense of Intellectual Freedom & Doubt 

Chapter Four: ‘I Wished to Unite Men’: A Vision of Religious Calm in the Midst of an Intellectual Storm

Chapter Five: ‘We Must Have Clothing and a Shelter’: Search for a Religious Home

Chapter Six: ‘We Are Ourselves Too Polemical’: Formation of a Rhetorical Pugilist

Chapter Seven: ‘A Dangerous and Pestilent Fellow’: Return to Religious Liberalism

Chapter Eight: ‘An Uncompromising Catholic and a Thoroughgoing Papist’: End of a Long Journey 

Epilogue

O autorze

Ángel Cortés is an Associate Professor of History at Holy Cross College, USA. Cortés holds degrees in Psychology, Religious Studies, and History.

Blurb

This book reveals the origins of the American religious marketplace by examining the life and work of reformer and journalist Orestes Brownson (1803-1876). Grounded in a wide variety of sources, including personal correspondence, journalistic essays, book reviews, and speeches, this work argues that religious sectarianism profoundly shaped participants in the religious marketplace. Brownson is emblematic of this dynamic because he changed his religious identity seven times over a quarter of a century. Throughout, Brownson waged a war of words opposing religious sectarianism. By the 1840s, however, a corrosive intellectual environment transformed Brownson into an arch religious sectarian. The book ends with a consideration of several explanations for Brownson’s religious mobility, emphasizing the goad of sectarianism as the most salient catalyst for change.