Orestes Brownson on Catholicism and Republicanism (Conservative Minds Revisited) (Orestest Augustus Brownson, Author and Clergyman) (Writer on Social and Religious Questions‪)‬

ORESTES BROWNSON'S PRESENCE looms large in Russell Kirk's celebrated 1953 tome, in large part because, for Kirk, Brownson represents a luminous thinker unjustly neglected by modern scholars. (1) Even further, Brownson seems to be a central figure not only in the nineteenth-century development--or maintenance--of order in American society, but, for Kirk, is someone whose prose remains genuinely instructive for contemporary citizens; he is "one of those dead who give us life." Brownson's insights are called upon in Kirk's culminating essay in The Conservative Mind, and shortly after that book's publication Kirk edited a collection of Brownson's essays for the Henry Regnery Company. (2) The collection highlights the range of Brownson's interests and the expansiveness of his thought. Whereas in The Conservative Mind, Kirk treats Brownson almost exclusively as a religious thinker, the Regnery collection includes almost exclusively political, and largely secular, tracts. (3) Brownson did not acquire his political and religious views in a systematic fashion, and the circuitous path of his intellectual and spiritual journey was the source of both his great strength and his weakness, to the extent that he had one. (4) He was born in Vermont in 1803, but at the age of six (after the death of his father) was sent to live with an elderly couple with a Calvinist-Congregationalist bent--though they were not regular churchgoers. At fourteen, his mother brought him back to her new home in upstate New York, where he encountered a variety of sects and nonbelievers. Then, at the age of nineteen, he entered a Presbyterian church in Ballston one day and was baptized there, one month later.