What is this?
The Daily Eudemon is a blog written almost exclusively by me, Eric Scheske. TDE topics include the following (each link is a representative post):
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Idiosyncratic
TDE touches on all those topics (and more), but it concentrates on the general social and cultural milieu, including ways we entertain ourselves. TDE’s [...]
Orestes Brownson said, on a speaking tour on “The Church and the Republic,” that every society is exposed to two opposite dangers: absolutism of the state and absolutism of the individual. In order to mediate between the two dangers, and give each, the state and the individual, their due, there must be a third party, [...]
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: [...]
National Catholic Register has a nice cover story this week about the Wichita, Kansas diocese. The diocese implemented a highly-successful stewardship program that emphasized Catholic schools. The result: Its 38 schools are now thriving and tuition free.
We’re guessing the Wichita bishop preaches the importance of a genuine Catholic education–and not in the vague, “parents [...]
What’s this blog about?
Pop culture, religion, history, literature, philosophy, humor, and drinking–usually from a Catholic perspective, but in a manner that non-Catholics find inviting.
What is a eudemon?
A spirit of light.
How do you pronounce “eudemon”?
Random House Dictionary says, “you-dē’mun.” I like the hip hop pronunciation: “you-duh-MAN.”
Didn’t you used to be called “The Wednesday Eudemon”?
Yes. Actually, [...]
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Tuesday, July 20th, 2004
“If you would make a man happy, study not to augment his goods; but to diminish his wants.” Orestes Brownson
Orestes Brownson’s Conversion
When Brownson started taking concrete steps toward Rome, it was philosophy that paved the road. His was a philosophical conversion, Rome via Athens, though he would later emphasize that no mental process can ever produce a convert unless grace is also at work (philosophy can remove the intellectual barriers, he would explain, but [...]
Fyodor Dosoyevsky, Orestes Brownson’s junior by eighteen years, would write on a theme similar to Brownson’s concerns about humanitarian democracy. Just as Brownson worried that North American progressives would sacrifice men on the altar of the abstractions known as “Man” and “The Rights of Man,” Dostoyevsky feared that the European progressive’s equivalent idealism, “Reason,” would [...]
Orestes Brownson was mostly a kind man, his made-for-public-consumption polemics notwithstanding. He was tenderly affectionate toward his wife and children and had many friends. He was deeply devoted to God; after his conversion, always writing with a crucifix in front of him and a statue of the Virgin Mary at his side.
He was also [...]
Although he was a collaborator with the radical Fanny Wright (and her partner, socialist Robert Owen), and had veered strongly toward agnosticism himself, Orestes Brownson (1803-1876) quickly found their anti-religion stance intellectually clumsy. The radicals taught that religion/superstition (the two are synonymous for radicals) were coeval with the human race, which was pock-marked with imperfections [...]
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