Brownson, Orestes Augustus (1803-1876)

US writer, religious thinker, and a keen social and religious reformer. In turn a Presbyterian, a Universalist minister, and a Unitarian pastor, he founded his own sect in 1836. In 1844, he became a Catholic; as an apologist for Catholicism (and for American democracy) thereafter, he was uncompromising; his controversial works were widely read in his day.

He was born in Stockbridge, Vermont, and largely self-educated. In 1838 he founded and became editor of the Boston (from 1844 Brownson's) Quarterly Review. He was also associated with the transcendentalist movement, which believed in the essential unity of all creation. His chief works were Charles Elwood, or the Infidel Converted (1840), a book in which he strongly supported the Roman Catholic Church, and The American Republic: its Constitution, Tendencies and Destiny (1865).