In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

This book is one of Kinsman's works that's available on line in downloadable form . Almost exactly a century after its 1926 publication, this is a tough book to parse, in part because the issues that seem to have started Kinsman's train of thought are in some ways now moot. The wave of Catholic immigraton that took place in the post-Civil War period ended in the 1920s, while the decline of Main Line Protestantism that Kinsman anticipated has largely taken place. However, I think the main force of his argument is still relevant, and even relevant to current circumstances. His concern, from the perspective of his recent conversion and sudden change of life from the peak of Protestant respectability to association with Catholic immigrant hordes, seems to have brought him to the question of how the hordes, and the Church that largely arrived with them, can integrate into Protestant American society. And let's keep in mind that he speaks quite consciously as someone whose...

The photo above is the second of two provided by a visitor of Kinsman from the St Paul's School website. It shows him as a master at St Paul's, which he was up to 1896, when he was ordained an Episcopal priest. Born in 1868, he would have been in his mid-20s at the time of the photo. A difficulty in tracking down biographical information on Frederick Joseph Kinsman is that both his father and grandfather were named Frederick Kinsman as well. Due to this problem, I erred in an earlier post here in saying that Frederick Joseph was the son of a Cleveland judge. Judge Frederick W Kinsman (1807-1884) was actually Frederick Joseph's grandfather, a prominent citizen of Warren, OH. In 1832, his father-in-law built him a house on "Millionaire's Row" in Warren as a wedding gift. The house is preserved as a historical exhibit . Kinsman's first wife died young, and their children all died in infancy. His second wife was Cornelia Pease Kinsman. Their children were...

A visitor found the photo above of Kinsman as a student at St Paul's School in Concord, NH. This is actually a key part of his background, as he makes clear in Salve Mater that the Kinsmans were a pominent Ohio family, There's a Kinsman Road and a Kinsman district in Cleveland. That Frederick would attend St Paul's School, one of the St Grottlesex group, and become an Episcopal bishop are indications of his and his family's high standing in society. Kinsman's literary product as a Catholic is complex, and with much of it available to me due to the generosity of a visitor, I'm finding it deserves detailed reading and reflection. Reveries of a Hermit is an example. About half of it is the closely reasoned apologetic I've discussed here, but there's a Part II which is about the same length but more difficult to parse. It sets out to be an essay on three saints connected with the ancient city of Ephesus, but in the middle, there's a chapter on Birc...

There's been a certain amount of background noise over recent generations, especially from commentators like Alan Dershowitz, that quotas persist in ivy League and similar elite schools, and although the schools insist that Jewish quotas are a thing of the past, quotas of all sorts have grown and become steadily more intricate. There may no longer be Jewish quotas per se, but admissions criteria that de-prioritize applicants from affluent suburbs have a similar effect, and these persist. The first impression I had, just days after arriving at Dartmouth, was that some of my clasmates were in effect flying coach, while others flew first class. This was at complete variance with the public narrative current at least in the 1950s and early 60s that the elite schools were highly selective based on grades, test scores, and extracurriculars, and those selected were the best and the brightest. This view was reflected in David Brooks's remarkably silly 2000 book, Bobos in Paradise, ...

The remarks I quoted from Frederick Kinsman yesterday on Anglo-Catholics, that among them "there was much exercise of private judgment, both in a chronic fastidiousnesss which spent its energy in pointing how everyone else was more or less wrong" go a long way for me in explaining what's happened in the North American ordinariate. A visitor comments, The “chronic fastidiousness” of which Kinsman speaks is a defining characteristic of the ordinariate. No doubt it is more difficult in the Catholic church to flout constituted authorities, at least where they have taken a position, but the mindset that “we have it right, and everyone else is wrong” is everywhere, and the “everyone” often means other ordinariate communities, not just benighted “Novus Ordo” parishes. After over four hundred comments on a video of the mass at St Timothy, Sykesville which revealed their use of women servers and guitar accompaniment, the administrator of the Anglican ordinariate ...

The section of Reveries of a Hermit most relevant to my purpose is the chapter on Anglicanism. He traces its origin to exclusively secular and political concerns: Change of religion in Englnd did not arise from a desire for revision such as Luther's, or for rediscovery such as Calvin's. It was the result of the policies of Tudor sovereigns. Four of these successively imposed on their subjects such religious establishment as seemed to them expedient. Henry VIII substituted Royal for Papal supremacy: Edward VI inaugurated changes aiming at English copying of Swiss models: Queen Mary, using Royal Supremacy to replace Papal, brought back Catholicism as far as she could: Queen Elizabeth adopted a series of compromises, intended to reduce to a minimum religious differences within her realm, and her policies have ever since largely prevailed in the English-speaknig world. (pp 122-123) I simply don't know what's taught now in Eng Lit, but up to the 1970s, this was regard...

I found Frederick Kinsman's Reveries of a Hermit enormously stimulating, and as I said the other day, its title is misleading. His main argument is that the varieties of Protestantism are all actually versions of agnosticism: The aim of these lectures is to compare and relate three points of view from which the Christian religion is regarded. The first looks on it as something based on unreliable legends, and therefore negligible, except as myth expressive of picturesque fantasies. The second professes to hold its essentials but is ever ready to relegate component parts into the category of non-essentials, is eclectic; and the successive stages of its history are chracterized by rejections rather than by retentions. The third regards it as the one great fact in human history, to be retained intact and given dominant place in human life. Common names for these points of view are, the Agnostic, the Protestant, and the Catholic. . . . One main purpose of the investigation ...