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Orestes Brownson (1803-1876) is known as the foremost American Catholic lay apologist of the nineteenth century. However, before his conversion to Catholicism in 1844, Brownson labored for nearly twenty years as a Protestant, publishing prodigiously and debating frequently with leading luminaries of his day, including William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Using little known and underutilized primary sources, this book traces Brownson's theological development as a Protestant against the backdrop of the post-Enlightenment problem of establishing the grounds for the possibility of divine revelation. As such, it offers an excellent vantage point into the antebellum American intellectual context while allowing Brownson's Protestant thought to stand on its own as an original and enterprising intellectual response to the religious problems of the day.
Orestes Augustus Brownson (1803- 1876) was a philosopher, essayist, and minister whose broad-ranging ideas both reflected and influenced the social and religious mores of his day. This superb biography by Patrick Carey provides a thorough, incisive account of Brownson's shifting intellectual and religious life within the context of American cultural history. Based on a close reading of Brownson's diary notebooks, letters, essays, and books, this biography chronicles the course of Brownson's eventful life, particularly his restless search for a balance between freedom and communion in his relations with God, nature, and the human community. Yet Carey's work is more than an excellent account of one man's development; it also portrays the face of an important period in American religious history. What is more, 200 years after Brownson's birth, America is marked by the same pressing social and religious issues that he himself addressed: religious pluralism, changing religious identifications, culture wars, military conflicts, and challenges to national peace and security. Carey's book shows how Brownson's values and ideas transcend his own time period and resonate helpfully with our own.
Between the American Revolution and the Civil War, the dialogue of religious skepticism and faith shaped struggles over the place of religion in politics. It produced different visions of knowledge and education in an "enlightened" society. It fueled social reform in an era of economic transformation, territorial expansion, and social change. Ultimately, as Christopher Grasso argues in this definitive work, it molded the making and eventual unmaking of American nationalism. Religious skepticism has been rendered nearly invisible in American religious history, which often stresses the evangelicalism of the era or the "secularization" said to be happening behind people's backs, or assumes that skepticism was for intellectuals and ordinary people who stayed away from church were merely indifferent. Certainly the efforts of vocal "infidels" or "freethinkers" were dwarfed by the legions conducting religious revivals, creating missions and moral reform societies, distributing Bibles and Christian tracts, and building churches across the land. Even if few Americans publicly challenged Christian truth claims, many more quietly doubted, and religious skepticism touched--and in some cases transformed--many individual lives. Commentators considered religious doubt to be a persistent problem, because they believed that skeptical challenges to the grounds of faith--the Bible, the church, and personal experience--threatened the foundations of American society. Skepticism and American Faith examines the ways that Americans--ministers, merchants, and mystics; physicians, schoolteachers, and feminists; self-help writers, slaveholders, shoemakers, and soldiers--wrestled with faith and doubt as they lived their daily lives and tried to make sense of their world.
"Why," an exasperated Jonathan Edwards asked, "can't we be contented with. . . the canon of Scripture?" Edwards posed this query to the religious enthusiasts of his own generation, but he could have just as appropriately put it to people across the full expanse of early American history. In the minds of her critics, Anne Hutchinson's heresies threatened to produce "a new Bible." Ethan Allen insisted that a revelation which spoke to every circumstance of life would require "a Bible of monstrous size." When the African-American prophetess Rebecca Jackson embarked on a spiritual journey toward Shakerism, she dreamt of a home in which she could find multiple books of scripture. Orestes Brownson explained to his skeptical contemporaries that the idea drawing him to Catholicism was the prospect of an "ever enlarging volume" of inspiration. Early Americans of every color and creed repeatedly confronted the boundaries of scripture. Some fought to open the canon. Some worked to keep it closed. Sacred Borders vividly depicts the boundaries of the biblical canon as a battleground on which a diverse group of early Americans contended over their differing versions of divine truth. Puritans, deists, evangelicals, liberals, Shakers, Mormons, Catholics, Seventh-day Adventists, and Transcendentalists defended widely varying positions on how to define the borders of scripture. Carefully exploring the history of these scriptural boundary wars, Holland offers an important new take on the religious cultures of early America. He presents a colorful cast of characters-including the likes of Franklin and Emerson along with more obscure figures--who confronted the intellectual tensions surrounding the canon question, such as that between cultural authority and democratic freedom, and between timeless truth and historical change. To reconstruct these sacred borders is to gain a new understanding of the mental world in which early Americans went about their lives and created their nation.