Orestes

Christianity Today has run a decent article about Orestes Brownson. Link. The article has a few serious flaws, which is predictable since the article is apparently written by a non-Catholic. Brownson's later life (from his conversion to Catholicism in his early forties) cannot be understood from outside Rome. Anyway, here's the link and an excerpt:

[When Brownson converted to Catholicism], his erstwhile fellow Transcendentalists felt betrayed–maybe even that progress itself had been betrayed. Brownson was tarred with the pejorative image that Patrick W. Carey has defiantly incorporated into the subtitle of his splendid intellectual biography, Orestes A. Brownson: American Religious Weathervane. Never mind that to defend the Church of Rome in mid-19th-century America was hardly to flow with the times. Never mind that Brownson maintained his Catholic identity unwaveringly unto death–his life having more than 30 years still to run. Brownson was marginalized with the slur that he was intellectually unstable and largely edited out of the official record. Peter Augustine Lawler, in an introduction to Brownson's The American Republic, observes, "It is very likely that had Brownson remained a Transcendentalist, he would be widely and admiringly studied as part of the mainstream development of American thought."