After John Shoebridge Williams became a Spiritualist medium in February 1852, establishing what he believed to be contact with the spirit of his deceased daughter, Eliza, and access to the wisdom of the spirit world, the sixty-one-year-old man came to the startling realization that he was assuming the features of a woman. At least, this is what he thought as he recorded the events of March 15, 1852, in his spiritual Journal:

Over the past five years, the American public has witnessed a flurry of interest in “character” and “character or moral education.” In 1992, William Kilpatrick wrote a book that attracted widespread attention, Why Johnny Can't Tell Right from Wrong: Moral Illiteracy and the Case for Character Education. A year later, William Bennett's best-selling anthology of remedial readings appeared, The Book of Virtues. More recently, Gertrude Himmelfarb published a book on the Victorian golden age of morals. At the same time, within the educational field, a subprofession of consultants devoted to character work has aimed to affect schooling at the elementary and secondary levels. As early as the mid-1970's, theologians and ethicists began discussing the idea of character, taking their cue from Stanley Hauerwas. Common to all of these writers is the belief that character has a necessary tie to religion and democracy.

Building on an ample foundation of (often feminist) revisionary literary scholarship, which over the last decade has fostered a substantial reexamination of “sentimental” texts created by late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century American novelists, recent studies of sentimentality in nineteenth-century American culture have continued to expose its political import, social complications, gender paradoxes, and racial construction. Once dismissed as shallow tearjerkers, American sentimental novels, which often drew on the example of British fictional models from Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1747-1748) to Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (1843) and Little Dorrit (1857-1858), have recently been recognized as “the most radical popular form available to middle-class culture.” By now, Leslie Fiedler's despair in the face of the alleged artistic impoverishments of these books has been abandoned by many critics, who, bypassing or modifying Fiedler's aesthetic imperatives, now prefer to ask pointed questions about the “cultural work” that these books have performed within American society.

Philip Gleason has observed that the Roman Catholic church in the United States has been an “institutional immigrant” for much of its history. The idea of an “institutional immigrant,” posed in the Singular and distinguished from “the immigrant peoples who comprised the Catholic population,” presupposes a basic if undefined unity to American Catholicism. The nature of that unity has always been a highly contested issue. Gleason's formulation also suggests that the experience of the Catholic church is illuminated by considering its history in light of the processes that have occupied students of immigration—Americanization, generational transition, assimilation, the invention of ethnicity, and the like. The nature of these processes has also given rise to debates as Americans grapple to understand their cultural identity. In short, Gleason's idea lends itself to debate about the normative significance of American Catholicism, American culture, and their relationship to one another. In the interest of enriching this debate, I would suggest that the Roman Catholic church in the United States has also been an institutional emigrant.