In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

A visitor found this brief note in the New York Times from May 1919 referring to news that was apparently generally known at the Episcopal Church annual meeting that Kinsman was planning to retire. (He was 50.) The most visible reason he gave for his wish to retire at that time was that he seemed unhappy with his role as bishop, but he also noted that there were "deeper reasons". It also appears that his father's health, which we may speculate based on remarks in Reveries of a Hermit must have been paralysis following a fairly recent stroke, was a secondary factor. I have a sense that oral history of how this event played out in the Episcopal Church at the time has been passed down, and I would be most interested to hear of any such accounts. The report suggests much of this was fairly well known and understood by Kinsman's colleagues at the time. However, Kinsman seems to have kept his main motivation for resigning confidential until his formal letter of resignati...

A few weeks ago I asked why Andrew Cuomo, of sll people, had suddenly fallen from grace amid MeToo allegations, most of them old and trivial, to the point that many New York Democrats have called for his resignation. That he ordered nursing homes to tale COVID patients. thereby spreading the disease among the most vulnerable, has been a distant also-ran in the case against him. But even there, similar allegations against Gov Whitmer of Michigan have gained little traction, much less than those against Cuomo. Why are the Democrats, enabled by media hysteria, eating their own? I've said here that Robert Barnes is among the most insightful commentators we now have. His difficulty is that he talks in two-hour YouTube interviews with several interlocutors, and the discussions are rambling and desultory, with no transcripts. I hope something can be done about this. The problem is that Barnes is a busy attorney, and I don't understand how he even takes so many hours out of his sched...

Above is a photo of the residence on Kinsman's Maine estate, Birchmere, which currently operates as a bed and breakfast . There are other photos at the link. You can rent the place for $490 per night. A Facebook post indicates the place had been vacant for some years prior to 1985, and its current condition reflects considerable renovation, so that very little of the interior would be how it was when Kinsman lived there. If I had the means, I'd certainly want to stay there now. At the time Kinsman lived there, the place could be reached only by boat across the pond. There is now a four-wheel-drive accessible road. Kinsman also built a tower on the property that later served as a mausoleum for him and his family. At this point, I can't locate any photos of the tower/mausoleum on the web. This appears to be where he did his studying and writing. Census data indicates that both of Kinsman's parents and his sister lived in the Wilmington, DE bishop's residenc...

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, ...