The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist by Dorothy Day

The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist Reviews

• 
  Padraic

  In many ways this is a difficult book - Dorothy was nothing if not difficult. Her reduction of Christianity to a lived pattern of daily actions (pray, feed the hungry, clothe the naked) leaves not much room for those things most of us view as essential (no matter how much she listened to the opera on the radio, or read Dostoevsky). It's a hard knock life.
  
  But, oh, the joy that came like an oil strike from those years of intensity!
  
  I was in New York City the night she died, riding a cab uptown, spending money as one must to survive as a tourist. It was cold and wet, and the Christmas lights were shining brilliantly on the pavement. Something felt weirdly absent from the earth.
• 
  Carl

  Dorothy Day spent almost half her lifetime waiting for her call, her spiritual call. But when it came it was not a religious call. It was not the act of having her daughter baptized a Catholic, though that single act cost her a common law husband. It was not the systematic instruction in Catholicism. It was not having herself baptized nor was it her first communion in the Catholic Church. In fact three years after these last of these events, she was still looking for a direction in her life.
  
  But when it came it was not a call to ritual, it was not a call to communion, it was a call to service, and it came in the form of a visit from one Peter Maurin, a Frenchman, a revolutionary, a proselytizer, a Catholic, who was referred to her by one of her publishers. What Peter brought to her, rather what he insisted she undertake, was to put her faith into action in serving the poor.
  
  The program he preached to her and which got implemented in stages over the next many years was a newspaper, a daily, the Catholic Worker; hospitality houses in the big cities to help the working poor; and rural farming communes.
  
  All of these did happen but in her autobiography Dorothy Day does not claim credit for them, rather she says they just happened as various of them were sitting around and talking:
  
  

  We were just sitting there talking when Peter Maurin came in.
  
  We were just sitting there talking when lines of people began to form saying, "We need bread."....If there were six small loaves and a few fishes, we had to divide them. There was always bread.
  
  We were just sitting there talking and people moved in on us. Let those who can take it, take it. Some moved out and that made room for more. And somehow the walls were expanded.
  
  We were just sitting there talking and someone said, "Let's all go live on a farm."
  
  It was as casual as all that, I often think. It just came about. It just happened.

  
  
  The Long Loneliness
  Along the way on this journey and throughout it, though she was usually surrounded by people, Dorothy Day felt regularly The Long Loneliness, which she describes, in her view as unique to women:
  
  

  I was lonely, deadly lonely. And I was to find out then, as I found out so many times, over and over again, that women especially are social beings, who are not content with just husband and family, but must have a community, a group, an exchange with others. Young and old, even in the busiest years of our lives, we women especially are victims of the long loneliness.
  
  
  It was years before I woke up without that longing for a face pressed against my breast, an arm about my shoulder. The sense of loss was there.
  
  I never was so unhappy, never felt so great the sense of loneliness. No matter how many times I gave up mother, father, husband, brother, daughter, for His sake, I had to do it over again.
  
  Tamar [her daughter] is partly responsible for the title of this book in that when I was beginning it she was writing me about how alone a mother of young children always is. I had also just heard from an old woman who lived a long and full life, and she too spoke of her loneliness.

  
  
  Ultimately, what she discovered and shares with others who might feel the same is:
  
  

  We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.

  
  
  Dorothy Day's message in her autobiography, in her life, is that women in general, and her specifically, are subject to a deep and long loneliness from the repeated losses of life, and that the only resolution for this long loneliness is to be found in the sacrifice of service to others and in a community doing so. That she did in The Catholic Worker Movement.
  
  My Evaluation
  
  As I have said elsewhere
  about spiritual quest stories
  
  

  At the risk of sounding cynical, after reading The Seven Storey Mountain and The Long Loneliness, two of the more important autobiographical spiritual quest stories of the mid-twentieth century I am left asking myself whether there is anything new to be learned about the spiritual quest after you have read Augustine?

  
  
  Dorothy Day's is no exception. I found a good part of her autobiography tedious, sometimes simply daily listings of people and events, not so much as to offer insight as seemingly to name and document. But once she met Peter Maurin this story and her life took off. So if you begin this book hang in there through the early tedium, the latter third of the book is worth your patience.
  
  As a mater of fact, while I was reading the book and got to her meeting with Perer Maurin, what I wrote was:
  
  Well, finally, on page 166, with just a hundred pages to go in the book, the real story, The Catholic Worker story, begins with Dorothy Day's first meeting with Peter Maurin.
  She had just returned from covering a workers' protest in Washington, DC, was tired, walked into her apartment in New York to be met by one Peter Maruin, referred to her by one of her publishers. She asserted,
  

  Peter the French peasant, whose spirit and ideas will dominate the rest of this book as they will dominate the rest of my life.

  
  Indeed!
  
• 
  booklady

  The Long Loneliness tells the life story of Catholic social activist Dorothy Day. It was required reading for our Spiritual Classics class. At the time, it seemed an unusual choice to me being too modern to yet be considered a ‘classic’. Viewed from the wider perspective, I believe Sr. Jan wanted us to see/learn the importance of active faith or faith-in-action as lived by this remarkable woman. Dorothy Day's life was a constant series of choices for God, not so much between good and evil but between ‘the good’ and ‘the better’, something not so easily or readily discernible even where and when it is recognized.
• 
  Donald

  Beautiful book that wades through Day's journeys in left-wing journalism and her long transition into a Catholic radical. Told in a way that emphasizes personal experience and presents arguments more in how they jive with her intuitions and moral outlook rather than dry political debates. The most interesting part was her ruthless self-criticism, though, where she always questions her own motives and pushes herself to go further down the road of the Gospels.
• 
  Kristina

  “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.”
  
  Having been fascinated by Dorothy Day since I started teaching religion almost 20 years ago, I figured it would be a great time to finally read her autobiography! It really was a wonderful insight into her inner life, her feelings, and her tenacity. I don’t think she would have had much time for me though; my zeal for social justice and charity pale when compared to hers. Granted, her early adulthood in the 1920s and 1930s was the “golden age” of social justice in American Catholicism with so many different political ideologies and causes vying for attention. Dorothy Day’s commitment to “walking the walk” of poverty and humility remains unmatched and her efforts and sacrifices can be felt by every worker in America today. She remains one of my favorite heroines.
• 
  P.J. Sullivan

  This book is autobiography, but focusses on the author's conversion to the Catholic faith. A very significant conversion it was because it led to the creation of the Catholic Worker movement. From her youth Dorothy Day felt empathy for the poor. She wanted to work for social justice when she joined the Socialists and the Wobblies, but was unsatisfied with idealogies that denied God. So she explored Christianity and in time followed the Christian gospels—and her own instincts—into the realms of pacifism, direct service to the poor, and what she called voluntary poverty. Her meeting with Peter Maurin in 1932 provided the catalyst for the creation of the Catholic Worker newspaper, which begot the movement. Readers of this book will see the pieces coming together, falling into place, that made the movement possible, maybe even inevitable. Because to this day the Catholic Worker has its roots in her interpretation of the Christian gospels.
  
  She wrote in her diary that in this book she “tried to write only of those things which brought about my conversion to the faith.” So this is not a comprehensive biography, and it ends in 1952. "We did not search for God when we were children," she writes. At university she saw religion as "an opiate of the people and not a very attractive one." But by page 132 she writes, "I was surprised that I found myself beginning to pray daily." Then, "I began to go to Mass regularly on Sunday mornings." This book is about her gradual transformation from unchurched Bohemian to candidate for sainthood, how it happened and what she thought about it. The book is in three sections: pre-conversion, conversion, and post-conversion. Section three discusses Peter Maurin and the early history of the Catholic Worker community.
  
  Her writing style is much like her life was, down-to-earth, simple, personal. But what food for thought! About spirituality and religion, practical philosophy, social justice, war and peace, family life and community. And history, of course, as she experienced it--and made it. Hers was a very eventful life in the front lines of the struggles for peace and social justice, which makes for a riveting read.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• 
  Kevin W

  I find myself relating a lot to Dorothy and appreciate her writing style. Her work she has done is inspiring and learning about her life helped contextualize her desires to help the poor and defend the rights of workers. Unfortunately she spends a lot of time "name-dropping" which disrupts the flow of the narrative. Though some parts were personal, much of it was about describing those she worked with. It wasn't quite what I was expecting, but I don't regret reading it.
• 
  Leonor

  A Longa solidão é a 2a autobiografia de Dorothy Day, uma mulher extraordinária e única, com um percurso de vida aberto a toda a transformação e a toda a possibilidade, até à conversão e a tudo o que construiu a partir daí. Foi tantas coisas que poderiam ser opostas e contraditórias e que, porém, foram sendo o encadeamento natural e muito consciente de uma vida em andamento que quer mais do que apenas a súmula dos dias.
  Dorothy Day é uma descoberta inspiradora nestes dias em que se vive ao sabor da corrente, sem se pensar, sequer, se a corrente segue um rumo bom.
• 
  Lisa Kentgen

  In some ways this book is dated but the story of Dorothy Day is important for anyone who is interested in peace and justice. The movement she started, the Catholic Worker, was extraordinary. Highly recommend.
• 
  Katelyn Beaty

  An extraordinary life of an irreplaceable woman caught up in the radical ways of Christ.
• 
  Pater Edmund

  Dorothy Day's memoir is very beautiful and moving, but also challenging. Beautiful and moving because Day is such a lovable, good person, who truly tried to live the Gospel. But challenging because Day was an anarchist-distributist, committed to an egalitarian-emancipatory idea of justice, and a pacifist; while I am an authoritarian-corporatist, committed to an hierarchical-aristocratic view of justice, and an account of the transcendence of the common good that justifies war under certain conditions. What makes Dorothy Day's positions so challenging is that they are so clearly rooted in her own experience concrete experience of poverty and injustice, and of the power of the Gospel. My own thinking on political and economic matters is very abstract and based mostly on book-learning.
  The notional and abstract must of course always be rooted in the real and concrete; the danger of unmooring it and creating a "system" independent of reality is grave. But on the other hand, the notional also makes more precise and distinct what is known confusedly in concretion.
  Some persons think that Dorothy Day was "too radical"-- by which they seem to mean that she was too condemning of industrial capitalism-- by my difficulty with her is virtually the opposite--that she was not radical enough. I think her condemnation of the evils of capitalism was spot on, but that her conception of the alternative was too much of a piece with the whole ideological structure of modernity that helped bring capitalism about.
  One of the most magnificent things about Day is deeply felt sense of solidarity. She writes of her thoughts as she lay in a prison cell long before her conversion:
  "I was the mother whose child had been raped and slain. I was the mother who had born the monster who had done it. I was even that monster, feeling in my own breast every abomination." (p.70)
  It was this sense of solidarity that lead her eventually into the Church:
  "It was the Irish of New England, the Italians, the Hungarians, the Lithuanians, the Poles, it was the great mass of the poor, the workers who were the Catholics in this country, and this fact in itself drew me to the church."
  It was this deep felt sense of solidarity that made the made Day so sympathetic to the egalitarian ideology of the left. Unfortunately this colors even her reading of scripture. She loves to say "call no man master, for ye are all brothers," but unfortunately the only way of realizing this that she can she is through liberty and equality and anarchy. My difficulty with this is that there are a great many other passages of scripture which show that solidarity is based in the participation in the great common good of peace, and this presupposes distinction of rank.
  On her Catholic Worker farming communes Day tried to realize her conception of anarchical fraternity, this caused some rather predictable problems:
  "William Gauchat who headed the house of hospitality, furnished an apartment for single women in need, and a married couple arriving first, were sheltered there. But when Bill wanted to put a few single women into the empty bedrooms, the couple announced that they had possession and refused to allow them entrance. Our guests know that we will not call upon the police to evict them, that we are trying to follow the dear Lord's teach- ings, “If anyone take your coat, let go your cloak also to him. . . . Give to him that asks of you and from him that would borrow, turn not away. You have heard that it has been said, you shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you, love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you, that you may be the children of your father who is in heaven who makes his sun to rise upon the good and the bad and rains upon the just and the unjust.” When another family came to Maryfarm, we explained that we were trying to open a retreat house and that we did not have room for them. It was the family of one of our own willful leaders who “loved God and did as he pleased.” He did not wish to remain on a farm belonging to his father, where he was forced to work too hard. He and his wife refused to listen and unpacked their things to stay with us. First they took over the lower farmhouse. After a few conflicts due to their possessing themselves of retreat house goods (as common goods) they moved to the upper farm to join Victor. For the following year they continued their guerrilla tactics from the upper farm, coming down to make raids on the retreat house food and furnishings, explaining to retreatants that they were true Catholic Workers and that the retreat house was a perversion of the movement." (261-262)
  It is not hard to guess what St Paul would have have to say about that. "Non est dissensionis Deus, sed pacis." It is hard to square St Paul with egalitarian anarchism:
  Slaves, be obedient to those who are your earthly masters, with fear and trembling, in singleness of heart, as to Christ; not in the way of eye-service, as men-pleasers, but as servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart, rendering service with a good will as to the Lord and not to men... (Eph 6:5-7)
  It seems to me that the problem here is that Day's thinking was too concrete: she considered merely the evil and unjust form of servitude that she found in the economic system of her time and did not consider its essence in abstraction.
  The same I think can be said of her pacifism. One can apply to her what Belloc (one of her favorite authors) says of his own pacifist friends:
  "[When] a man says that war is wrong, he is saying something which, as it stands, is manifestly nonesense. But if we expand the phrase it has full and definite meaning. He means "for one organised community to attempt destruction and physical pain upon the organization of another such community with the object of gain or increase of power is wrong." And so it undoubtedly is." (The Cruise of the Nona, p. 110)
• 
  Amy

  I don't know much about Dorothy Day and I admit that might have colored my interaction with this memoir. My interest waned once her conversion occurred. But I still found this a powerful, interesting look at how one woman's zealous faith in childhood turned to socialism in college and eventually Catholicism in later life.
  My overall biggest takeaway was that the perceived radicalism of my own college days was nothing new. The hippie movement of the 60s was nothing new. This book, originally published in the 1950s, feels so strikingly familiar at times you would almost think it written by a Millennial. But instead it tells a familiar story of longing for independence and social change.
  I might not agree with all (or even most) of her takeaways, but still well-worth reading.
• 
  Bob

  Summary: A memoir of the life of Dorothy Day up to 1952, describing her search for God and a meaningful life, her conversion to Catholicism, her catalytic friendship with Peter Maurin, and the early years of the Catholic Worker movement.
  
  This is the memoir of a woman who grew up in a middle class family, the daughter of a sports writer, a teen who read Upton Sinclair and Doestoevsky, spent two years at the University of Illinois, then left to pursue life as a writer on the lower east side of Manhatten, working for several Socialist publications, getting arrested for the first time in 1917 (her last was as a 75 year old!). She went through several love affairs with the likes of Eugene O’Neill and Mike Gold. Along the way, she had an abortion, and lived what one would call a very “bohemian” lifestyle. An unlikely candidate for sainthood, you might say, and yet the Archdiocese of New York has opened the cause for her canonization, allowing her to be designated “A Servant of God.”
  
  The memoir covers her early life and all these episodes although it devotes very little time to the period she spent in Europe. What we see is a woman haunted by a longing for God, struggling with “the long loneliness” of human existence, the sense of being alienated or apart from even those closest in life. She appears to find a happy existence in a Staten Island home she bought with proceeds from selling a screen play. She is in a kind of “common law” relationship with Forster Batterham, socially conscious but a principled atheist. They seem to enjoy an idyllic life until the birth of daughter Tamar, which intensifies Dorothy’s spiritual search as she reads Catholic literature and talks with several Catholic sisters and priests. First she brings Tamar to be baptized, and then at the end of 1927, enters the Catholic Church, and leaves Batterham, who loves her but utterly opposes this decision. She speaks of the struggle she has with the decision, which literally ended up making her ill. Yet in the end, when faced with a choice between Batterham and God, she chooses God. Nevertheless, they remained good friends for the remainder of their lives.
  
  Dorothy struggled with reconciling her concerns for the poor and social activism with her Catholic faith. It wasn’t until the searching convert and a wandering social theologian, Peter Maurin meet up that these two strains are reconciled in her life. It is a catalytic relationship for both, resulting in the launching of the Catholic Worker movement. She chronicles the birth of this movement with its paper sold for a penny (to this day), its houses of hospitality (now 216 in the U.S. according to their website), and their farming experiments. The vision was of places where laborers could find food, welcome, and thoughtful conversation and retreats that addressed the spiritual side of their existence as well as sustained advocacy for workers’ rights. Maurin helped Day integrate Catholic social teaching with her faith, and I think Day helped Maurin translate his visionary ideals into actual communities.
  
  The book concludes with Day’s beautiful account of Maurin’s death, and their acquisition of a new house in New York City, which she attributes to Maurin’s prayers. In her postscript she comes back to the theme of “the long loneliness.”
  
  “We have all known the long loneliness and we have learned that the only solution is love and that love comes with community.
  
  It all happened while we sat there talking, and it is still going on.”
  
  This memoir suggested several things to me. It reminded me that the externals of how a person is living is not a reliable indicator of their spiritual hunger or the work of God in their lives. At several points Dorothy was exposed to very “other worldly” versions of Christianity that failed to capture her imagination because they did not address life in this world. And the book exposes the power of community, and the reality that even with all our human foibles and flaws, people drawn together in Christ might indeed find the “only solution” to our long loneliness.
• 
  Crissy Crim

  “The Long Loneliness” was sure a “long read”. Dorothy Day is definitely a ‘modern’ day saint but her autobiography left me feeling the Lenten dryness. The parts where she does discuss her childhood, her spiritual journey, and aspects of the Catholic Worker and charity programs she founded were very insightful. Many things she said was like she was my reading my secret thoughts. However, she brings out what we all think, experience, and long for as human beings. We are definitely created to adore God and there is a long loneliness when we are separated from Him, though she describes the Long Loneliness in a different light. We are constantly longing for God and at times to ultimately Love Him means we must make sacrifices. For her it was the sacrifice of no longer having her common law husband, creature comforts, amongst other sacrifices she embraced.
  The problem with her writing is the fact it rambles and is very dry. When she does start discussing her personal life and her spiritual journey, it is enlightening. Unfortunately she abruptly starts changing paths in her story and refer back in time, or fast forwards, and speaks about people she had encountered, or she goes on and on about all these philosophers and social justice radical/communism/anarchist authours she devoured since she was a youth. There are pages literally she talks about these writers. Understanding, yes she had to speak about these writers to let the audience know where her mindset and influences stem from; however, she keeps doing this repeatedly throughout the books and she says the same things over and over when referring to them.
  My advice? I would not read this novel if you have no clue who is Dorothy Day. You will not make it past the third chapter and you will miss out a lot of her Dorothy Day’s beautiful story and spiritual life. Pop some popcorn and rent the movie, or browse online for overview of Dorothy Day. This book was a ‘long read’ and I had to laugh as I approach the last part of the book and her first confessor and dearest priest friend told Dorothy that her writing was dull and had no style. Dorothy was a wonderful woman and I have no doubt she is in heaven. Yet, I can tell she was a journalist not a novelist.
  
• 
  Christian Engler

  The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day has long been held to be an important social document as well as a meaningful written Catholic memoir, because it delves deeply into the intimate conversion experience whereby there is a moving epiphany that changes that person so completely and totally. And The Long Loneliness illustrates that point quite clearly. Even before the Catholic Worker was ever founded by Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, their approach to religious activism was almost on par with other lay Catholic social orgaizations, mirroring the motto of Catholic Action, founded in 1868, the best, whose battle cry is: Prayer. Action. Sacrifice. However, what makes this memoir so appealing is that it is outlined in a belief framework of pragmatic thought and a consistent work ethic, like Opus Dei. Dorothy Day, in the recounting of her conversion and the afteraffects of it, is not given to flights of supernatural fancy or prone to self-created mystical experiences or visions, which, when people do have them, are psychosomatic or psychotic, at best.
  
  There are various reasons why people enter the Catholic Church, and for Day, she wanted her daughter-Tamar-to not flounder in a life of sexual radicalism and voracious wantonness, both of which wounded her quite grievously before she had her conversion experience. Before she became Catholic, Dorothy Day was a doer rather than a sayer; she put action behind her words, and she found comfort in the Gospel: feeding the hungry and clothing the poor. The latter was the very impetus for why The Catholic Worker was established, to make it real, living and vibrant for others. What is recounted in the Long Loneliness is not any caliber of theological scholarship or penetrating analysis of the Gospel. Rather, besides being lived, Catholicism in conjunction with pacificism, economics, helping the downtrodden and the labor movement is thoroughly explored. And yet, simplicity, simplicity, simplicity is exemplified throughout. Through her collected writings, especially her memoir, Dorothy Day illuminated that in accepting the Catholic ideal, everyone must carry their cross if they want the world to be even a slightly better place and that the Catholic faith is not one to take lightly.
  
• 
  Madhubrata

  One day in the autumn of 2019, I was waiting for my turn at the physiotherapist's office and reading The Bible on my Kindle. Or maybe it was 2018. I had sprained my ankle that year and broken a wrist the next, so it is difficult to keep track. I didn't expect to get much out of it, I probably just wanted something to keep me occupied. I find conversion narratives a little corny, but something irrevocable happened as I read the New Testament. The Sermon on the Mount, and I was amazed at a god who could say such things.
  The Gospel was almost shocking to me, because it seemed so different from the staid and respectable religion I knew as Christianity. Instead, what I found here was scandal. I didn't know it then, but what made me read scripture was my own loneliness. If this is indeed the autumn of 2019 that I remember, I had read Margery Kempe for a class in university the previous semester. I had despite my agnosticism felt a strange kinship to Margery through the loneliness I found her inhabiting. I would read Simone Weil later, and find the same loneliness in her as well. The Gospel hinted at something- something that helped you transcend loneliness. But could you evade it altogether? That was doubtful.
  In 2019 I would have considered myself a leftist and a feminist. Maybe I had to cool a little politically to truly appreciate Dorothy- there is much here that would offend twenty first century sensibilities. This does not take away from the radicalism of her project. What I found truly touching in The Long Loneliness is the honesty of her testimony, the grace with which she embraces the vulnerability this task opens her up to. Amidst despair, it is the more comforting- the "rosy " aspects of religion perhaps that seem the most fairtyale-like. The vision of perfect love that then be almost offensive. For Dorothy Day, this perfect love is no distant ideal. She is honest about the challenges that accompany the task of this love. It is after all work that underpins her vision of public morality. But the love that emerges as and through work is no wishy-washy, candy-in-the-sky thing. It is inseparable from the everyday life of everyday people.
• 
  Jon C

  About half way through. This is my first exposure to Day's writing, and I am underwhelmed - in the writing, that is, not in her. I don't find her writing engaging, although her story certainly is. (I wasn't surprised when she wrote about how others felt that her writing lacked some passion.) Still, it's well worth continuing and I am looking forward to part 3.
  
  * * * * * * * * * * * *
  
  I just finished, and am thoroughly impressed with Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement. My opinion about the book ultimately remains unchanged (from above), but I will give it this: I believe that part the reason the book lacks engagement is that Day herself is humble and understated. There were moments when she wrote with great engagement, and others when she was more reserved. The writing was strongest when she was writing about someone else whom she admired; to wit, Peter Maurin.
  
  I am attracted to people who take shit seriously, and Dorothy Day took shit seriously - I don't think I can come up with a better example, short of the Book of Acts, of someone or someones taking the Sermon on the Mount seriously - if I had to compare her to anyone, it would be Matthew leaving his tax collecting post to follow Christ (not that Day was a tax collector...my point is that she voluntarily took on poverty for the sake of others).
  
  * * * * * * * * * * * *
  
  After thinking about this for a few weeks now, I've concluded that she wrote less engagingly because she was being self-effacing. I get the impression she didn't want to talk about herself, but that others did, similar to Thomas Merton or Therese of Lisieux (although usually I suspect that the former didn't mind it all that much). That's a plus, in my opinion, and a good reason to reread her autobiography.
• 
  Julie Davis

  I felt about this very much as I felt about St. Therese of Lisieux's Story of a Soul — I liked half of it a lot. In Therese's case I liked the last half, in Dorothy Day's case I liked the first half. It told a lot about her life and the conditions of the time in which she grew up, which were really interesting and put her into a lot of context. She seems to have had an inborn desire to seek God, which I relate to, which she couldn't escape no matter what her living conditions. In the last half she spent a lot of time on personalities's stories which I didn't care about which accounts for my disinterest in that section. I much prefer
  On Pilgrimage for a look at daily life with Dorothy Day, especially since it is a journal account going over about a year.
  
  However, it was definitely worth reading once and I'm glad I did.
• 
  Nathan

  There are some books that are painfully exemplary; they hurt to read because they are reminders of another life nobler, lovelier and far more dedicated than your own. This is that sort of book. Apart from Day's Catholicism, this book resonated so deeply with me, showing by practical example the sort of life that I only theorize about, a life devoted to humanity and driven by deep affection for one's faith and community. An important record of a movement, an honest spiritual biography and an inspiring call to action.
• 
  Louis

  What a life! Dorothy Day is inspiring in her commitment to her faith, in putting her faith in action, despite the opinions, criticisms, and dogmas of others and of institutions. I admire her blend of anarchism and Christianity, and how by blending them, she cleaved to the truest core of those seemingly different ideologies and theologies, and demonstrated how very compatible (and necessarily so, if they are to be lived out instead of merely preached) they are. An exemplar of self-sacrifice, of helping others in meaningful ways, of loving in the most radical and uncompromised sense!
• 
  Jared

  This was a great book by catholic social activist and co founder of the catholic workers movement Dorothy Day. Being an autobiography, it was awesome to see the transformation that this woman's life took. Inspiring to see the road Dorothy Day traveled as she discovered her purpose in life. The book challenges action on the part of christians to love your neighbor as yourself, and above yourself. Now I want to go live in a hospitality house and care for the poor and homeless!
• 
  Ian

  I found myself refreshed learning about this kind of radicalism. Such passion for Christ, and yet so different from the familiar preachers, missionaries and such. Doris revealed to me a new approach for the faith and helped me see what poverty, sacrifice, grace and service for the Lord mean. I felt drawn into the world in which she lived and could use that position to re-evaluate my own. Her clear, expressive writing was a joy to read.
• 
  Jean

  This is a re-read. And it remains a favorite - not for the style of writing or for the way in which the story is told (i actually think that that leaves a good bit to be desired) - but i feel reassured by the character and ideology of Dorothy Day and have had new lessons, new thoughts to consider each time I've read it.
• 
  Shannon

  This book is pretty darned relevant in 20 freaking 16.
  
  "I write these things now because sometimes I am seized with fright at my presumption. I am afraid, too, of no telling the truth, or of distorting the truth. I cannot guarantee that I do not, for I am writing of the past." (59)
  
  "When I think of the human suffering, the terrible amount of energy needed to move even infinitesimally toward a more decent life, I am amazed at human patience." (62)
  
  "What with the confessed dynamiting of the Times Building in Los Angeles by the McNamara brothers, American Federation of Labor men, and the history of the Molly Maguires, every charge of violence brought against labor leaders was believed. Yet again and again witnesses against them were shown to be perjurers, and in the Lawrence textile strike it was proved that the guards and detectives hired by the employers were the ones who planted evidence to frame a case against Giovannitti and Ettor, the strike leaders." (64)
  
  "I lost all feeling of my own idenity. I reflected on the desolation of poverty, of destitution, of sickness and sin. That I would be free after thirty days meant nothing to me. I would never be free again, enver free when I knew that behind bars all over the world there were women and men, young girls and boys, suffering constraint, punishment, isolation and hardship for crimes of which all of us are guilty. THe mother who had murdered her child, the drug addict -- who were the mad and who the sane? Why were prostitutes prosecuted in some cases and in others respected and fawned on? People sold themselves for jobs, for the pay check, and only if they received a high enough price, they were honored. If their cheating, their theft, their lie, were of colossal proportions, if it were successful, they met with praise, not blame. Why were some caught, not others? Why were some termed criminals and others good businessmen? What was right and wrong? What was good and evil? I lay there in utter confusion and mystery." (78)
  
  "I could get away, but what of the others? I could get away, paying no penalty, because of my friends, my background, my education, my privilege. I suffered but was not part of it. I put it from me. It was too much for me." (105)
  
  "I have long since come to believe that people never mean half of what they say, and that it is best to disregard their talk and judge only their actions." (107)
  
  "But Sasha refused to undersand. 'You just do not like him,' he sighed, as though he had found me lacking. And what he insinuated was hat I was irritated because this friend had not fallen in love with me exclusively but paid amorous attention to other women he came in contact with." (123; mansplaining, early 20th century style)
  
  "Whenever Freda was at a loss as to how to correct [her son] and had scolded and berated him, she finally said, "Really, Dickie, I'll just have to talk religion to you, if you don't mend your ways. I really don't see how to make you understand that you must have consideration for other people and not be mean and cruel. Ethics are too abstract and I can't make you see the ethical side of things." (131)
  
  "There had been periods of intense joy but seldom had here been the quiet beauty and happiness I had now. I had thought all those years tha I had freedom, but now I felt that I had never known real freedom nor even had knowledge of what freedom meant." (135)
  
  "One must do things sometimes to make life more bearable." (141, quoting St. Teresa of Avila)
  
  "We all crave order, and in the Book of Job, hell is described as a place where no order is." (141)
  
  "I made up my mind to accept what I did not undersand, trusting light to come, as it sometimes did, in a blinding flash of exultation and realization." (143)
  
  "I loved the church for Christ made visible. Not for itself because it was so often a scandal to me. Romano Guardini said the Church is the Cross on which Christ was crucified; one could not separate Christ from His Cross, and one must live in a state of permanent dissatisfaction with the Church." (149)
  
  "How I longed to make a synthesis reconciling body and soul." (151)
  
  "One can conceive of a city with art and culture and music and architecture, and the flowering of all good hings, as the image of the heavenly city. Heaven is pictured as a city, the heavenly Jerusalem. I was enjoying the city that summer." (119) (History was happening in Manhattan and she just happened to be in the greatest city in the world) (Also, similar to Hildegard's visions)
  
  "He [Peter Maurin] did not begin by tearing down, or by painting so intense a picture of misery and injustice hat you burned o change the world. Instead, he aroused in you a sense of your own capacities for work, for accomplishment. He made you feel that you and all men had great and generous hearts with which to love God." (171)
  
  "The holy man was the whole man, the man of integrity, who not only tried to change the world, but to live in it as it was." (191; speaking of Ade Bethune, Eric Gill, and Peter Maurin)
  
  "In the helpless resentment of these men there was a fury which city authorities were afraid would gather into a flood of wrath, once they were gathered into a mob. So among every group in the public square, at the meetings of the unemployed, there were careful guardians of law and order watching, waiting to pounce on these gray men, the color of the lifeless trees and bushes and soil in the squares in winter, who had in them as yet none of the green of hope, the rising sap of faith." (195) (DOES THIS NOT SOUND EXACTLY LIKE BLACK LIVES MATTER?)
  
  "The trouble was that he never filled in the chasms, the valleys, in his leaping from crag to crag of noble thought." (195; speaking of Peter Maurin)
  
  "All things are yours, whether it be Paul or Apollo or Cephas, or the world, or life, or death, or things present, or things to come. For all are yours. And you are Christ's. And Christ is God's." (199, quoting St. Paul)
  
  "Ritual, how could we do without it! Though it may seem to be gibberish and irreverence, though the Mass is offered up in such haste that the sacred sentence 'hoc est corpus meus' was abbreviated into 'hocus-pocus' by the bitter protestor and has come down into our language meaning trickery, nevertheless there is a sureness and a conviction there... We have too little ritual in our lives." (200)
  
  "The Catholic Worker, as the name implied, was directed to the worker, but we used the word in its broadest sense, meaning those who worked with hand or brain, those who did physical, mental or spiritual work. But we thought primarily of the poor, the dispossessed, the exploited." (204)
  
  "When we entered the dispute [the Ohrbach strike] with our slogans drawn from the writings of the Popes regarding the condition of labor, the police around Union Square were taken aback and did not know what to do. It was as though they were arresting the Holy Father himself, one of them said, were they to load our pickets and their signs into their patrol wagons. The police contented themselves with giving us all injunctions. One seminarian who stood on the side lines and cheered was given an injunction too, which he cherished as a souvenir." (206)
  
• 
  Jodie Pine

  I really knew nothing of Dorothy Day before this book. Her life was truly fascinating (although I sometimes got bogged down by the details in her autobiography). I was especially impacted by her commitment to the poor and the life of community she helped to create through hospitality houses and farming communes, her decision to become Catholic after the birth of her daughter and how she connected Catholicism with social action for the rest of her life, and how writing played such an important role first through journalism and then The Catholic Worker publication.
  
  She said, "The only answer in this life, to the loneliness we are all bound to feel, is community. The living together, working together, sharing together, loving God and loving our brother, and living close to him in community so we can show our love for Him."
• 
  Martinez Claudio

  A great heart, a stubborn hope, a lust for poverty , a needy Church in a new world...just what we need in the XXI century. A prophet. A clunky body, a joie de vivre in the middle of the meek and poor. A saint. A new beginning. A lesson for myself. A capitalism misfit, a socialist who hated violence and loved the Cross, and obeyed Him as Master. A powerful scream on the middle of our noisy and empty, nihilistic, Barren postmodern era
• 
  Fr Adam Zettel

  This woman's life is amazing! She's also an amazing writer and has a beautiful style. There is a lot on the political level that is beyond me, but she has so many interesting insights. I think that I have been tempted at times to join those in the Church who despair at changing the world and decide we should resort to just trying to save souls. At times it seems the world is going to hell in a handbasket and I want to focus just on saving souls, not society. But she shows how important it is, and for all I can tell she does it in a most Christian way. They make an effort to change laws but also do everything they can just to help those in need around them as Christ asks us to. The Church needs both!
  
  On the other hand, sometimes I run into Catholics who are too caught up in trying to change the world, in expecting the world to be changed, and even in believing that all of society ought to become Christian. I believe we should hope that all should become Christian, but at the same time, we know "the way is narrow and there are few that follow it". While fighting to ensure just laws and a just society, is it reasonable to expect that they also be Christian laws? I think that even while the world is pagan and has a non-Christian worldview, we can work with it to ensure justice and charity for all members of society.
  
  So we have to be able to accept being a minority and in some ways even to undergo the small "persecutions" that come wit being a Christian in a world that doesn't understand. We also have to courageously share the message of Christ, while at the same time knowing that there will always be few who follow him.
  
  And always always always love those in need and work to help them. Dorothy says that when someone came asking for bread, they could never turn them away. There would always be some left, they would always divide it up so as to give the beggar at least something.
• 
  Theresa

  I love this book. It tells of her life and the progression it took but does so in a way that feels natural and true, not some big revelatory act waiting to happen. That’s the beauty of Dorothy’s way, I suppose; that you are always working and traveling and doing the good that you can as you go.