Biography of Isaac Thomas Hecker (December 18, 1819 - December 22, 1888), an American Roman Catholic Priest and founder of the Paulist Fathers, a North American religious society of men; he is named a Servant of God by the Catholic Church.

Isaac Thomas Hecker (December 18, 1819 - December 22, 1888) was an American Roman Catholic Priest and founder of the Paulist Fathers, a North American religious society of men; he is named a Servant of God by the Catholic Church. Hecker was originally ordained a Redemptorist priest in 1849. Then, with the blessing of Pope Pius IX, he founded the Missionary Society of St. Paul the Apostle, now known as the Paulist Fathers, in New York on July 7, 1858. The Society was established to evangelize both believers and non-believers in order to convert America to the Catholic Church. Father Hecker sought to evangelize Americans using the popular means of his day, primarily preaching, the public lecture circuit, and the printing press. One of his more enduring publications is The Catholic World, which he created in 1865. Hecker's spirituality centered largely on cultivating the action of the Holy Spirit within the soul as well as the necessity of being attuned to how He prompts one in great and small moments in life. Hecker believed that the Catholic faith and American culture were not opposed, but could be reconciled. The ideas of individual freedom, community, service, and authority were fundamental to Hecker when conceiving of how the Paulists were to be governed and administered. Hecker's work was likened to that of Cardinal John Henry Newman, by the Cardinal himself. Father Hecker's cause for Sainthood was opened January 25, 2008, in the mother Church of the Paulist Fathers on 59th St, New York City.

Five essays offering analysis of Hecker's thought from the perspectives of church history, political science, theology, and psychology. +

Story of the founding of the Paulist Fathers.

The United States has a long history of religious pluralism, and yet Americans have often thought that people’s faith determines their eternal destinies. The result is that Americans switch religions more often than any other nation. The Chance of Salvation traces the history of the distinctively American idea that religion is a matter of individual choice. Lincoln Mullen shows how the willingness of Americans to change faiths, recorded in narratives that describe a wide variety of conversion experiences, created a shared assumption that religious identity is a decision. In the nineteenth century, as Americans confronted a growing array of religious options, pressures to convert altered the basis of American religion. Evangelical Protestants emphasized conversion as a personal choice, while Protestant missionaries brought Christianity to Native American nations such as the Cherokee, who adopted Christianity on their own terms. Enslaved and freed African Americans similarly created a distinctive form of Christian conversion based on ideas of divine justice and redemption. Mormons proselytized for a new tradition that stressed individual free will. American Jews largely resisted evangelism while at the same time winning converts to Judaism. Converts to Catholicism chose to opt out of the system of religious choice by turning to the authority of the Church. By the early twentieth century, religion in the United States was a system of competing options that created an obligation for more and more Americans to choose their own faith. Religion had changed from a family inheritance to a consciously adopted identity.

In its first half century the United States was visited by scores of curious European travellers who came to investigate the strange new world that was being created in the Western Hemisphere. In their accounts of the experience they praised, or condemned, the institutions and national characteristics spread out before them, seized avidly upon all differences from the European norm, and worried each peculiarity beyond recognition and beyond any just limit of its importance. Americans themselves, with the keen sensitiveness of the young and the boasting enthusiasm natural to vigorous creators of new ideas and institutions, examined the work of their hands and, believing it good, reassured themselves and answered their calumniators in a flood of aggressive replies. Every American interested in a reform movement, a new cult, or a Utopian scheme burst into print, adding another to the rapidly growing list of polemic books and pamphlets. From this variety of sources, it is possible to recapture something of the inward spirit that gave rise to the more familiar and more tangible events of America’s youth.

At the end of his weekly news-in-review program, Moore on Sunday beloved WCCO-TV newsanchor Dave Moore often signed off by reciting a poem. These poems, composed by Moore's son Peter and collected here for the first time, offer a fresh and funny take on the common and not-so-common stuff of our everyday lives. Reminiscent of Ogden Nash and Tom Lehrer, with a dash of Dr. Seuss, Peter Moore's verse captures the essence of his father's wit, common sense, honesty, and warmth.