Isaac Hecker

Isaac Hecker

Author: David J. O'Brien

Publisher: SUNY Press

Published: 1992

Total Pages: 484

ISBN-13: 9780809103973

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Isaac Thomas Hecker was the prototype nineteenth-century American. He was an idealist and a visionary, a believer in the "rightness" of the American experiment. A utopian at heart, Hecker sampled life in New England's transcendentalist communes, later entering the Catholic Church where he began a new community that was founded on the ideals of freedom and personal initiative. He had all the virtues and all the flaws of his era, being optimistic, passionate, energetic, far-sighted, naive. Yet Hecker was also profoundly counter-cultural. He was a mystic in an age of pragmatism. He proclaimed the value of the collective to a generation of Americans who already were falling under the influence of laissez-faire individualism. Within his adopted Catholic community he championed personalism to an unreceptive audience; Rome and its hierarchy were in a defensive posture that favored obedience and conformity. In the end Rome assailed "Americanism" as a threat to its good order. David J. O'Brien has written the first, full life of Isaac Hecker to appear in a hundred years. In the process he enables us to see Hecker's great significance for American religious and social history. Hecker was well-known in his own day--a friend of Thoreau, Emerson and Alcott, popular speaker, best-selling author--but soon after his death he slipped into semi-obscurity. To Catholic intransigents he was an embarrassment, to American pragmatists he was a curiosity. But the present age has witnessed a renewal of spiritual seeking that characterized Hecker's own journey, and the church he swore allegiance to has begun to see things the way he did. The time is ripe for this honest and comprehensive account of Isaac Hecker'sfascinating story.


Isaac Hecker for Every Day

Isaac Hecker for Every Day

Author: Ronald A. Franco

Publisher: Paulist Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 9780809146253

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Introduces the thinking and spirituality of Isaac Thomas Hecker, founder of the Paulist Fathers, on a daily basis in the context of the calendar year.


Paulist Father Isaac Hecker

Paulist Father Isaac Hecker

Author: Boniface Hanley

Publisher: Paulist Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 48

ISBN-13: 9780809152322

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"Paulist Father Isaac Hecker: An American Saint is a short biography about this fascinating and influential nineteenth-century religious figure. Father Hecker was a convert to the Catholic faith and a man who was 'a ahead of his times." His version has been the impetus for the religious charism of the Paulists and their various apostolates in North America." "For those who are already familiar with the Paulist Fathers, this concise work offers insights into the life of the Paulist founder and explains the origins of the Paulist mission that continues to the present day, Those not familiar with Isaac Hecker will learn his story and come to appreciate his remarkable vision for the American Church."--BOOK JACKET.


Prophets, Guardians, and Saints

Prophets, Guardians, and Saints

Author: Owen F. Cummings

Publisher: Paulist Press

Published: 2007

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 0809144468

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"This book seeks to explore various aspects of nineteenth-century Catholic tradition, as embodied in its movements, such as Modernism, and in Vatican Council I, but especially through its people - its popes, theologians, and saints."--BOOK JACKET.


American Religious History [3 volumes]

American Religious History [3 volumes]

Author: Gary Scott Smith

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2020-12-07

Total Pages: 1613

ISBN-13:

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A mix of thematic essays, reference entries, and primary source documents covering the role of religion in American history and life from the colonial era to the present. Often controversial, religion has been an important force in shaping American culture. Religious convictions strongly influenced colonial and state governments as well as the United States as a new republic. Religious teachings, values, and practices deeply affected political structures and policies, economic ideology and practice, educational institutions and instruction, social norms and customs, marriage, and family life. By analyzing religion's interaction with American culture and prominent religious leaders and ideologies, this reference helps readers to better understand many fascinating, often controversial, religious leaders, ideas, events, and topics. The work is organized in three volumes devoted to particular periods. Volume one includes a chronology highlighting key events related to religion in American history and an introduction that overviews religion in America during the period covered by the volume, and roughly 10 essays that explore significant themes. These essays are followed by approximately 120 alphabetically arranged reference entries providing objective, fundamental information about topics related to religion in America. Each volume presents nearly 50 primary source documents, each introduced by a contextualizing headnote. A selected, general bibliography closes volume three.


Making Catholic America

Making Catholic America

Author: William S. Cossen

Publisher: Cornell University Press

Published: 2023-08-15

Total Pages: 141

ISBN-13: 1501771019

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In Making Catholic America, William S. Cossen shows how Catholic men and women worked to prove themselves to be model American citizens in the decades between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Far from being outsiders in American history, Catholics took command of public life in the early twentieth century, claiming leadership in the growing American nation. They produced their own version of American history and claimed the power to remake the nation in their own image, arguing that they were the country's most faithful supporters of freedom and liberty and that their church had birthed American independence. Making Catholic America offers a new interpretation of American life in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, demonstrating the surprising success of an often-embattled religious group in securing for itself a place in the national community and in profoundly altering what it meant to be an American in the modern world.


The Cambridge Companion to American Catholicism

The Cambridge Companion to American Catholicism

Author: Margaret M. McGuinness

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-06-17

Total Pages: 391

ISBN-13: 1108633986

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This Companion provides a comprehensive overview of American Catholicism's historical development and distinctive features. The essays - all specially commissioned for this volume - highlight the inner diversity of American Catholicism and trace the impact of American Catholics on all aspects of society, including education, social welfare, politics, and intellectual life. The volume also addresses topics of contemporary concern, such as gender and sexuality, arts and culture, social activism, and the experiences of Black, Latinx, Asian-American, and cultural Catholics. Taken together, the essays in this Companion provide context for understanding American Catholicism as it is currently experienced, and help to situate present-day developments and debates within their longer trajectory.


The Chance of Salvation

The Chance of Salvation

Author: Lincoln A. Mullen

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2017-08-28

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 0674983149

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The United States has a long history of religious pluralism, and yet Americans have often thought that people’s faith determines their eternal destinies. The result is that Americans switch religions more often than any other nation. The Chance of Salvation traces the history of the distinctively American idea that religion is a matter of individual choice. Lincoln Mullen shows how the willingness of Americans to change faiths, recorded in narratives that describe a wide variety of conversion experiences, created a shared assumption that religious identity is a decision. In the nineteenth century, as Americans confronted a growing array of religious options, pressures to convert altered the basis of American religion. Evangelical Protestants emphasized conversion as a personal choice, while Protestant missionaries brought Christianity to Native American nations such as the Cherokee, who adopted Christianity on their own terms. Enslaved and freed African Americans similarly created a distinctive form of Christian conversion based on ideas of divine justice and redemption. Mormons proselytized for a new tradition that stressed individual free will. American Jews largely resisted evangelism while at the same time winning converts to Judaism. Converts to Catholicism chose to opt out of the system of religious choice by turning to the authority of the Church. By the early twentieth century, religion in the United States was a system of competing options that created an obligation for more and more Americans to choose their own faith. Religion had changed from a family inheritance to a consciously adopted identity.


Roads to Rome

Roads to Rome

Author: Jenny Franchot

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2024-03-29

Total Pages: 528

ISBN-13: 0520310306

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The mixture of hostility and fascination with which native-born Protestants viewed the "foreign" practices of the "immigrant" church is the focus of Jenny Franchot's cultural, literary, and religious history of Protestant attitudes toward Roman Catholicism in nineteenth-century America. Franchot analyzes the effects of religious attitudes on historical ideas about America's origins and destiny. She then focuses on the popular tales of convent incarceration, with their Protestant "maidens" and lecherous, tyrannical Church superiors. Religious captivity narratives, like those of Indian captivity, were part of the ethnically, theologically, and sexually charged discourse of Protestant nativism. Discussions of Stowe, Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Lowell—writers who sympathized with "Romanism" and used its imaginative properties in their fiction—further demonstrate the profound influence of religious forces on American national character. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1994.