With this beautifully rendered and expertly filtered compendium, Michael P. Federici brings into a single inviting volume the most relevant insights of one of our nation's most titanic yet scarcely remembered minds. Orestes Brownson was a man against his time, writing throughout and on both sides of the deadliest war in our history, he lived long enough to see his antebellum prophecies materialize without losing faith in the American Vision. Beginning his auto-didactical journey through the Western Tradition as an ardent Presbyterian, he passionately explored the religious and political thought of Unitarianism, Transcendentalism, and finally Roman Catholicism. In The Catholic Writings of Orestes Brownson, we are given his more seasoned insights, with enough remaining edge to reveal the hopeful if sober restlessness that animates his peculiar yet timeless style. In a time when it seems all truth is up for debate, and much of our national mythology has been perhaps too vigorously dissolved from the raw material of our history, men like Orestes Brownson stand out as pillars of wisdom upon which to re-build more durable ideas of ourselves.
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