This new collection of the Catholic writings of Orestes Brownson is very welcome. Brownson (1803-1876) was one of the few original political thinkers America has produced. Born in 1803 of Vermont Yankee stock, he traversed the full range of American religious and political opinion, including time spent as a friend and ally of Emerson and the community at Brook Farm. He was for a time a Universalist preacher, but he converted to Catholicism in 1844. He wrote several major works of political philosophy including The American Republic (1865), and his Catholic writings earned him the sobriquet “the Newman of America”.