Sectarianism and Orestes Brownson in the American Religious Marketplace
Sectarianism and Orestes Brownson in the American Religious Marketplace

Author: Ángel Cortés

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-07-10

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 3319518771

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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.

A Sense of the Heart
A Sense of the Heart

Author: Bill J. Leonard

Publisher: Abingdon Press

Published: 2014-11-18

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 1426756755

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For many people, knowing about God is not enough; they also want to feel God’s presence. Whether like St. Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus or like Wesley’s “strangely warmed heart,” people believe that nothing can substitute for religious experience. Even today, people go to church in order to encounter the Divine, by which they mean experience God in their midst. This desire to meet or be met by God is as old as humanity, but America especially has been the seed bed for what William James famously called “varieties of religious experience.” These experiences cover a wide spectrum from classic mysticism to revivalist conversion to a contemporary pursuit of spirituality. A Sense of the Heart traces the nature of religious experience from the colonial era to the present, attempting to define and describe the nature of religious experience and noting common and distinct approaches in the work of various scholars and practitioners. Following that, A Sense of the Heart offers a historical review of representative types of religious experience, the nature of such experiences and their impact on the American religious and cultural context as evident in awakenings, controversies, denominations, and new religious communities.