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The Convert; or, Leaves from My Experience
1857 · 294 pages
The Convert; or, Leaves from My Experience
by Orestes Brownson
Why our edition. In the free scan at least 1 word in 80 is garbled. Ours corrects the damage. The full text is public domain and free — linked below.
On this page: a summary of The Convert; or, Leaves from My Experience, and our clean edition as a PDF or EPUB.
Orestes Brownson's own account of a restless intellectual pilgrimage — through Presbyterian gloom, Universalism, Owenite socialism, and outright freethought — into the Catholic Church. One of nineteenth-century America's most combative men of letters retraces the reasoning, not merely the feeling, behind his conversion.
The changed life
A New England radical, labor agitator, and freethought editor who passed through nearly every 'ism' of his age before being received into the Catholic Church in 1844 — and spent the rest of his life defending the faith he had once attacked.
Summary
The Convert; or, Leaves from My Experience (1857) is Orestes Brownson's account of one of the most restless intellectual pilgrimages in American religious history. Before his reception into the Catholic Church, Brownson had passed through outright skepticism, Owenite socialism, Universalism, and Unitarian rationalism — and this book retraces that journey stage by stage.
What sets the narrative apart is its emphasis on reasoning rather than feeling. Brownson, among the most combative men of letters of his century, reconstructs the arguments and convictions that carried him through each position and finally into Catholicism, presenting his conversion as the conclusion of a long chain of thought.
As a firsthand document it is doubly valuable: a record of one man's mind and a map of the religious and social currents of antebellum America, written by someone who had lived inside several of them. It remains one of the major documents of nineteenth-century American religious life, told in Brownson's own voice.
Who was Orestes Brownson?
Orestes A. Brownson (1803–1876) was an American writer, editor, and public intellectual whose career touched nearly every religious and social movement of his age. He worked as a preacher and reformer, edited influential periodicals, and was known as one of the most forceful and independent-minded controversialists in nineteenth-century America.
His religious course moved through skepticism, Owenite socialism, Universalism, and Unitarian rationalism before his conversion to Catholicism in the 1840s, after which he became a prominent Catholic writer. The Convert is his own retrospective account of that intellectual and spiritual journey.
Which edition of The Convert; or, Leaves from My Experience is this?
Our public-domain edition presents Brownson's text in a clean, readable modern format with clear type, and we link to a free source as well.
Common questions
- Who was Orestes Brownson?
- He was a leading nineteenth-century American writer, editor, and controversialist who moved through skepticism, Owenite socialism, Universalism, and Unitarian rationalism before converting to Catholicism, after which he became a prominent Catholic author.
- What makes The Convert significant?
- It is Brownson's own intellectual autobiography, retracing the reasoning behind his passage through several beliefs into the Catholic Church. It is regarded as one of the major documents of American religious history.
A note on the text. The Convert; or, Leaves from My Experience is in the public domain. What you're buying is our edition: the careful typesetting and correction. The original text is also available free here.
That free scan runs about 2.5 errors per 1,000 characters (OCR mistakes, stray marks, broken words). Our edition corrects them.
Related reading
The same road, argued
Questions of the Soul
Isaac Hecker · 1855
Isaac Hecker went through Brook Farm and Fruitlands as Brownson went through freethought and transcendentalism; this is the book Hecker wrote for others still looking.