Orestes A. Brownson

Orestes Brownson
Brownson in 1863, by G. P. A. Healy.
Born	Orestes Augustus Brownson (1803-09-16)September 16, 1803 , United States
Died	April 17, 1876(1876-04-17) (aged 72) Detroit, United States
Nationality	American
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Orestes Augustus Brownson (16 September 1803 – 17 April 1876) was a New England intellectual and activist, preacher, labor organizer, and noted Catholic convert and writer. Brownson was a publicist, a career which spanned his affiliation with the New England Transcendentalists through his subsequent conversion to Roman Catholicism.

Brownson was born on September 16, 1803 to Sylvester Augustus Brownson and Relief Metcalf, who were farmers in . Sylvester Brownson died when Orestes was young and Relief decided to give her son up to a nearby adoptive family when he was six years old. The family raised him under the strict confines of Calvinist Congregationalism on a small farm in Royalton, Vermont. He did not receive much schooling but he immensely enjoyed reading books. Among these were volumes by Homer and Locke and the Bible. In 1817, when he was fourteen, Orestes attended an academy briefly in New York. This was the extent of his formal education.

In 1822, Brownson was baptized in the Presbyterian Church in Ballston, New York but he quickly complained that Presbyterians only associated with themselves, and that the Reformed doctrines of predestination and eternal sin were too harsh. After withdrawing from Presbyterianism in 1824 and teaching at various schools in upstate New York and Detroit, Brownson applied to be a Universalist preacher. Universalism, for Orestes, represented the only liberal variety of Christianity he knew of. However, Universalism also did not quell his desire for religious understanding. He became the editor of a Universalist journal, Gospel Advocate and Impartial Investigator in which he wrote about his own religious doubt and criticized organized faiths and mysticism in religion. Later, rejecting Universalism, he became associated with Robert Dale Owen and Fanny Wright in New York City and supported the Workingmen's Party of New York. In 1831, he moved to Ithaca, New York, where he became the pastor of a Unitarian community. There, he began publishing the magazine the Philanthropist. In it, he could express his ideas outside of the pulpit since he thought of himself as a better journalist than preacher.