Patrick W. Carey

Orestes Augustus Brownson (1803-1876) was a philosopher, essayist, and minister whose broad-ranging ideas both reflected and influenced the social and religious mores of his day. This superb biography by Patrick Carey provides a thorough, incisive account of Brownson's shifting intellectual and religious life within the context of American cultural history. Based on a close reading of Brownson's diary notebooks, letters, essays, and books, this biography chronicles the course of Brownson's eventful life, particularly his restless search for a balance between freedom and communion in his relations with God, nature, and the human community. Yet Carey's work is more than an excellent account of one man's development; it also portrays the face of an important period in American religious history. What is more, 200 years after Brownson's birth, America is marked by the same pressing social and religious issues that he himself addressed: religious pluralism, changing religious identifications, culture wars, military conflicts, and challenges to national peace and security. Carey's book shows how Brownson's values and ideas transcend his own time period and resonate helpfully with our own.

American Religious Weathervane

Orestes A. Brownson

Cardinal Avery Dulles, SJ, is the foremost American Catholic theologian of the post-Vatican II era. This book is a religious and intellectual biography that focuses on his contributions to the development of American Catholic theology and to the larger arena of American Catholic life. The book traces his life and thought from his childhood in a prominent American Presbyterian and political family to his days as a student at Harvard where he converted to Catholicism, to his World War II experience in the Navy, to his ordination as a Jesuit, and then to his career as a theologian in the post-Vatican II era. In the entire twentieth century, no other theologian, with the possible exception of John Courtney Murray, SJ, has had as important an impact upon American Catholic thought. Dulles, though, is unmatched in the twentieth century because of his prolific publications and the wide distribution and reading of his published theology. More bishops, priests, and religious, as well as large numbers of laity, have been influenced by his writings and by any other single American theologian. This book will put his contributions to theology within the wider context of his religious life and the cultural and religious transformations in the United States during the last half of the twentieth century. +

A Model Theologian, 1918-2008

Avery Cardinal Dulles, SJ

Confession is a history of penance as a virtue and a sacrament in the United States from about 1634, when Catholicism arrived in Maryland, to 2015, fifty years after the major theological and disciplinary changes initiated by the Second Vatican Council. Patrick W. Carey argues that the Catholic theology and practice of penance, so much opposed by the inheritors of the Protestant Reformation, kept alive the biblical penitential language in the United States at least until the mid-1960s when Catholic penitential discipline changed. During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American Catholics created institutions that emphasized, in opposition to Protestant culture, confession to a priest as the normal and almost exclusive means of obtaining forgiveness. Preaching, teaching, catechesis, and parish revival-type missions stressed sacramental confession and the practice became a widespread routine in American Catholic life. After the Second Vatican Council, the practice of sacramental confession declined suddenly. The post-Vatican II history of penance, influenced by the Council's reforms and by changing American moral and cultural values, reveals a major shift in penitential theology; moving from an emphasis on confession to emphasis on reconciliation. Catholics make up about a quarter of the American population, and thus changes in the practice of penance had an impact on the wider society. In the fifty years since the Council, penitential language has been overshadowed increasingly by the language of conflict and controversy. In today's social and political climate, Confession may help Americans understand how far their society has departed from the penitential language of the earlier American tradition, and consider the advantages and disadvantages of such a departure.

Catholics, Repentance, and Forgiveness in America

Confession

Joseph T. Lienhard

The last 20 centuries of Christian history have witnessed the emergence of numerous theological traditions. This reference provides alphabetically arranged entries for more than 450 Christian theologians. Included are entries for those individuals whose work was primarily in systematic and spiritual theology, or who were church historians chiefly concerned with theological matters. Whenever possible, each entry provides basic biographical information, a brief account of the theologian's education and career, and a summary of the person's most important contributions to theology. The entries end with bibliographies of primary and secondary sources, while the volume concludes with a selected, general bibliography.

Patrick W. Carey

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