He found his own views compatible with those of Brownson, who not only disputed the prevalent theory that morality has no place in politics but argued that morality is an integral part of the political process. Extensively utilizing Brownson's lesser-known writings, Butler examines, in chronological order, the phases of Brownson's personal and spiritual development, thereby assessing the importance and contemporary relevance of his thought. He gives special attention to Brownson's belief that the moral interpretation assigned to American political symbols - Liberty, Equality, the Rights of Man - are derived from the American understanding of the nature and destiny of the human soul. Brownson eventually came to believe that humankind can only progress by finding inspiration in the divine and that the American political order must be based in the Christian, especially the Roman Catholic, moral tradition.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the United States saw both a series of Protestant religious revivals and the dramatic expansion of the marketplace. Although today conservative Protestantism is associated with laissez-faire capitalism, many of the nineteenth-century believers who experienced these transformations offered different, competing visions of the link between commerce and Christianity. Joseph P. Slaughter offers a new account of the interplay between religion and capitalism in American history by telling the stories of the Protestant entrepreneurs who established businesses to serve as agents of cultural and economic reform. Faith in Markets examines three Christian business enterprises and the visions of a Christian marketplace they represented. Shaped by Pietist, Calvinist, and Arminian theologies, each offered different answers to the question of what a moral, Christian market should look like. George Rapp & Associates operated sophisticated textile factories as the business side of the model community the Harmony Society, which practiced communal living in pursuit of a harmonious workforce. The Pioneer Stage Coach Line provided transportation services only six days a week to keep Sunday sacred, attempting to reform society by outcompeting less pious businesses. The publisher Harper & Brothers sought to elevate American culture through commerce by producing virtuous products like lavishly illustrated Bibles. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Faith in Markets explores how the founders and owners of these enterprises infused their faith into their businesses and, in turn, how distinctly religious businesses shaped American capitalism and society.

Orestes A. Brownson was one of the most original, creative and controversial of the American intellectuals in early and mid-19th century America. This bibliography offers a complete list of over 1500 of his essays, pamphlets and books.

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.

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.

10. Catholicity Necessary to Sustain Popular Liberty -- 11. Authority and Liberty -- 12. The Works of Daniel Webster -- 13. Schools of Philosophy -- 14. Liberalism and Socialism -- 15. Civil and Religious Freedom -- 16. Liberalism and Progress -- Part III. Freedom and Communion -- 17. The American Republic -- 18. The Democratic Principle -- Notes

What did Protestants in America think about capitalism when capitalism was first something to be thought about? The Bible told antebellum Christians that they could not serve both God and mammon, but in the midst of the market revolution most of them simultaneously held on to their faith while working furiously to make a place for themselves in a changing economic landscape. In Friends of the Unrighteous Mammom, Stewart Davenport explores this paradoxical partnership of transcendent religious values and earthly, pragmatic objectives, ultimately concluding that religious and ethical commitments, rather than political or social forces, shaped responses to market capitalism in the northern states in the antebellum period. Drawing on diverse primary sources, Davenport identifies three distinct Christian responses to market capitalism: assurance from clerical economists who believed in the righteousness of economic development; opposition from contrarians who resisted the changes around them; and adaptation by the pastoral moralists who modified their faith to meet the ethical challenges of the changing economy. Delving into the minds of antebellum Christians as they considered themselves, their God, and their developing American economy, Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon is an ambitious intellectual history of an important development in American religious and economic life.