michael_kelleher's review against another edition
5.0
I absolutely loved this biography of Dorothy Day. I knew she met so much resistance, but maybe it would be fair to say that it is somewhat glossed over in The Long Loneliness. It makes me love her more & keep praying for her cause of sainthood.
marcy_kelleher's review against another edition
5.0
I absolutely loved this biography of Dorothy Day. I knew she met so much resistance, but maybe it would be fair to say that it is somewhat glossed over in The Long Loneliness. It makes me love her more & keep praying for her cause of sainthood.
debbiecuddy's review against another edition
5.0
I found it very inspiring to read this excellent biography of Dorothy Day. It provided a vivid account of her life, philosophy, and faith, as well as insight into the Catholic Worker movement. Her work continues today in Catholic Worker houses across the country, even here in my small town.
momey's review against another edition
5.0
Dorothy Day was one of my heroes when i was a kid and still is. I used to read the Catholic Worker in HS. I thought this biography was very helpful but still the core is in her writings/mission. It will be a new serious nail in the coffin as far as my opinion of the institution 'catholic church' if they ever grant her sainthood. talk about colonization.
booksrchill666's review against another edition
challenging
informative
inspiring
reflective
slow-paced
4.25
jennyshank's review against another edition
4.0
From Image, issue 105
IN HER 1952 AUTOBIOGRAPHY, The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day reflects
on society’s prevailing views about the poor: “From my earliest remembrance the
destitute were always looked upon as the shiftless, the worthless, those without
talent of any kind, let alone the ability to make a living for themselves. They were
that way because of their own fault. They chose their lot.” Day, of course, famously
rejected this view, lived by a vow of voluntary poverty, founded The Catholic Worker,
a newspaper dedicated to social justice and pacifism, championed the causes of
immigrants and migrant workers, and established Catholic Worker houses to feed
and shelter the destitute.
The radiantly talented Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s new memoir, Children of the
Land, about growing up as a low-income, undocumented immigrant in California,
demonstrates that little has changed in America’s popular conception of people like
him. When a drunk driver badly injured his mother, she cooperated with the police
to convict him, an act of bravery which should have qualified her for a special visa.
But the authorities, as if on a whim, deny it. “To the government,” Castillo writes,
“it was our fault. Always our fault.”
Stories like Castillo’s illustrate how radical and vital Dorothy Day’s beliefs and
work remain today. In 2000, Pope John Paul II named her a “Servant of God,”
taking one step in the formal process of considering her canonization. In 2015, Pope
Francis addressed congress during a visit to Washington, DC, praising four “great
Americans” who “shaped fundamental values which endure forever in the spirit of
the American people… Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, and
Thomas Merton.”
In citing Day’s “passion for justice,” Pope Francis may have stoked new interest
in a woman who long advocated for reforms similar to those that have moved many
people in recent years. It’s easy to imagine Day marching alongside those now
promoting racial equality, the dignified treatment of immigrants, workers’ rights,
pacifism, and income equity. Day flirted with socialism in her youth, writing for
socialist newspapers (though she never joined the socialist or communist party and
disavowed the association after she converted to Catholicism). According to a 2019
Gallup poll, 49 percent of young adults view socialism favorably (and 51 percent
view capitalism favorably). Especially relevant today is Day’s personalist philosophy,
which emphasized the dignity and value of each human and asserted that the only
proper attitude toward every person is one of respect and love; you can hear echoes
of personalism in the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2018 protests against
the migrant family separation policy.
This year saw the release of two works examining Dorothy Day’s life: the
documentary Revolution of the Heart, written, directed, and narrated by Martin
Doblmeier, and a biography, Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century,
by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph. While both offer nuanced considerations
of Day’s life, the documentary seems to aim to bolster the case for her canonization,
while the biography focuses on her bohemian early life, when she longed to become
a novelist equal to her famous literary friends.
Day makes a striking subject for a film, and Revolution of the Heart shows her in
all her iconic glory—statuesque and crowned with a coiled white braid, or, as Garry
Wills once wrote in Esquire, “an awesome woman, tall, lantern-jawed, with Modigliani
eyes.” Of course she’d have hated any attention paid to her looks, just as she scoffed
when anyone suggested she could become a saint (“Bullshit!”). Despite all her
renunciations, she would, however, embrace the title “anarchist.” As the documentary
details, this “grandmother and anarchist” landed on the FBI watchlist of subversives
to be rounded up in the event of a national emergency, because of ideas she espoused,
company she kept, and her participation in demonstrations—including those for
women’s suffrage and against the Vietnam War—that landed her in jail eight times.
Through interviews with Day’s grandchildren and others who knew her, clergy, and
writers and thinkers including Paul Elie, Cornel West, and Jim Wallis, as well as actor
Martin Sheen (who visited Catholic Worker houses for meals in his youth), the film
details how Day converted to Catholicism, prayed for a vocation, began a newspaper
with itinerant French theologian Peter Maurin on a shoestring budget, opened the
first Worker house with little plan or money, and became a devout, uncompromising
figure immersed in social justice movements throughout the world. Loughery and
Randolph’s lucid biography provides greater detail about the welter of controlled
chaos in which Day lived. Everything she attempted was so improbable that if she
had considered practicality, she may never have begun.
In the documentary, Robert Ellsberg, who left college to become managing editor
of The Catholic Worker in the late seventies, recalls once asking Day, “‘How do you
reconcile Catholicism and anarchism?’ She looked at me with a bemused expression
and said, ‘It’s never been a problem for me.’” She didn’t ask permission; she took
it. One of the few institutions she showed reverence for was the Catholic Church,
whose rules she strove to follow almost to the letter—although she challenged her
fellow Catholics to take Jesus’s strenuous demands in the Sermon on the Mount
more seriously. The only point on which she differed with the church significantly
was its doctrine of “just war.” Day believed nonviolence was always essential, and
while she earned praise for her breadlines during the Great Depression, when she
opposed America’s involvement in World War II, many turned against her, canceling
their Catholic Worker subscriptions.
Whether people approved of her or not, Day kept up her work. In one archival
interview, she recounts that the Brooklyn police once brought her a woman who was
filthy and covered with lice from sleeping outside in deplorable conditions. In New
York, one of the richest cities in the world, Catholic Worker houses were often a last
resort for those who had slipped through holes in the social safety net. Day accepted
nearly anyone who showed up at the door. She didn’t believe in overreliance on
government services to take care of the poor; she believed each of us should contribute
to taking care of each other, for the good of our own souls. Her vow of poverty was
an extension of this: she believed that if we remove ourselves from the suffering of
our fellow humans by putting too many layers of wealth and comfort between us
and them, we can never live as Christ wanted us to. And, as Ellsberg puts it, “The
goal of the Worker was not to fix all these people. It was not a social agency… You
just accepted people as they were and made room for them, as long as there was a
modicum of peace.”
Often the houses were chaotic and even dangerous, given the mental illness, lack
of hygiene, addictions, and rough habits of many she welcomed. The way Day ran
her Worker houses embodied Presbyterian pastor and writer Eugene Peterson’s belief
that “People are not problems to be solved. They are mysteries to be explored.”
Jim Wallis notes that Day was not a religious leftist. She was conservative in her
Catholicism, holding to its traditional practices from the time of her conversion in
her twenties. “She was radical in her social, economic, and political views because
of the conservatism of her faith.” Her belief in voluntary poverty grew out of this.
As Benedictine nun and author Joan Chittister observes, “She was witnessing to the
church itself. You taught us this; we’re doing it. Now don’t tell us we’re not Catholic.”
So far, so saintly, right? But some contend that Day will never become a saint
because of the sins of her early years. Both the book and movie sketch the personal
unhappiness of her youth—one lover forced her to have an abortion, after which
she attempted suicide twice. The atheist father of Day’s daughter Tamar refused to
marry her, and so Day, newly Catholic, painfully broke off their relationship when
Tamar was a toddler. During this dark time, Day lit a candle at church and prayed
to discover her vocation. A few days later, Peter Maurin turned up on her doorstep
with a plan to publish a newspaper that would advocate for social change.
The book and movie differ in their portrayals of Day as a mother. The biography
depicts her as being so busy with travel and running her newspaper and Worker
houses that Tamar didn’t always receive the attention she needed and subsequently
ended up adrift, with nine children and in a bad marriage to an alcoholic older man.
But in the documentary Kate Hennessy disavows this take: “My grandmother has
been accused of being an indifferent and neglectful mother, and that is just not what
my mother experienced… Dorothy was heroic in terms of her family obligations.”
Martha Hennessy admits that her mother Tamar experienced sacrifices growing up in
the turmoil of Worker houses but asserts that Tamar was as committed to Dorothy’s
work as her mother was.
Day didn’t like to discuss her hedonistic early years. She spurned writers who wrote
profiles mentioning her frequent visits in her twenties to the Greenwich Village bar
called the Golden Swan, known affectionately in the bohemian demimonde as “the
Hell Hole.” According to Loughery and Randolph, she could “drink most of the other
patrons under the table” and “hold her liquor better than [Eugene] O’Neill.” When
she was in her seventies, she burned a number of papers—personal correspondence
and writing. Perhaps she was trying to conceal her past, as Loughery and Randolph
speculate: “It was not how she wanted Peter Maurin to view her or how she wanted
the young people to think of her.” But another way of looking at Day’s tendency to
bristle over references to her youthful carousing is that she fervently believed in the
forgiveness and absolution provided by confession. After receiving the sacrament of
reconciliation, perhaps she felt she was a new person, and so she should be judged
by the way she lived her final fifty-three years, not her first thirty.
But her first thirty years do make for interesting reading. As the biography delves
into Day’s fascinating, chaotic early life, it’s a treat to learn that she hobnobbed with
Eugene O’Neill, Katherine Anne Porter, W.H. Auden, and other literary greats.
She wrote novels for years, and even a play, without much success; Loughery and
Randolph emphasize that fiction and drama were not her forte. Those of us who
write fiction will feel a pang as her efforts come to nothing and her literary friends
try not to offend her with honest reactions to her bad writing. But after all, if Day
had been as good a novelist or playwright as the company she kept, she may never
have discovered her unique calling.
Day may have failed as a literary writer, but she was a prolific journalist and memoirist
whose words stirred millions. She loved and supported literature, theater, art, and
classical music her whole life, and took solace in the arts. Loughery and Randolph
write, “As she aged, Dorothy’s aesthetic sense didn’t lessen; it deepened. She was
willing to allow herself more time for the pleasures of art.” If Dorothy Day does
become a saint, she could make a splendid patron for artists, people in poverty, pacifists,
single mothers, prisoners, social justice activists, and failed—but persistent—writers.
Are there flaws to the documentary and biography? Perhaps in the interest of
time—and bolstering the case for canonization—the fifty-seven-minute documentary
downplays the darkness of Day’s early years, the craziness and filth of the Worker
houses, and her genuine weaknesses; while the biography, which creates an admirably
balanced portrait, delves at times too far into minutiae and drops an overabundance
of names—though for the most part the names are fascinating ones. Both works
provide a welcome introduction to Day or a further education on her life.
Near the end of her life, Dorothy Day took an interest in the work of Cesar Chavez
among migrant farmworkers in California. “One of the best things that has been
happening in the United States is the strike of the United Farm Workers, headed
by Cesar Chavez,” Day says in the documentary. She traveled to California in 1973
when she was seventy-six to support a Chavez-led grape picker strike, where she was
arrested for the eighth and last time. “I first became a Catholic because I felt that
the Catholic Church was the church of the poor,” Day says in one interview, “and
I still think it’s the church of the poor. I think it’s the church of all the immigrant
populations that came over or were brought over.”
Though neither book nor documentary speculates about how Day would react to
current events, it’s certain that were she alive today, Day would have a thing or two to
say about the perpetually unpassed DREAM Act, which could provide citizenship to
people brought to the United States as children, and about the continued mistreatment
of undocumented immigrants and farm workers.
IN HER 1952 AUTOBIOGRAPHY, The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day reflects
on society’s prevailing views about the poor: “From my earliest remembrance the
destitute were always looked upon as the shiftless, the worthless, those without
talent of any kind, let alone the ability to make a living for themselves. They were
that way because of their own fault. They chose their lot.” Day, of course, famously
rejected this view, lived by a vow of voluntary poverty, founded The Catholic Worker,
a newspaper dedicated to social justice and pacifism, championed the causes of
immigrants and migrant workers, and established Catholic Worker houses to feed
and shelter the destitute.
The radiantly talented Marcelo Hernandez Castillo’s new memoir, Children of the
Land, about growing up as a low-income, undocumented immigrant in California,
demonstrates that little has changed in America’s popular conception of people like
him. When a drunk driver badly injured his mother, she cooperated with the police
to convict him, an act of bravery which should have qualified her for a special visa.
But the authorities, as if on a whim, deny it. “To the government,” Castillo writes,
“it was our fault. Always our fault.”
Stories like Castillo’s illustrate how radical and vital Dorothy Day’s beliefs and
work remain today. In 2000, Pope John Paul II named her a “Servant of God,”
taking one step in the formal process of considering her canonization. In 2015, Pope
Francis addressed congress during a visit to Washington, DC, praising four “great
Americans” who “shaped fundamental values which endure forever in the spirit of
the American people… Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, and
Thomas Merton.”
In citing Day’s “passion for justice,” Pope Francis may have stoked new interest
in a woman who long advocated for reforms similar to those that have moved many
people in recent years. It’s easy to imagine Day marching alongside those now
promoting racial equality, the dignified treatment of immigrants, workers’ rights,
pacifism, and income equity. Day flirted with socialism in her youth, writing for
socialist newspapers (though she never joined the socialist or communist party and
disavowed the association after she converted to Catholicism). According to a 2019
Gallup poll, 49 percent of young adults view socialism favorably (and 51 percent
view capitalism favorably). Especially relevant today is Day’s personalist philosophy,
which emphasized the dignity and value of each human and asserted that the only
proper attitude toward every person is one of respect and love; you can hear echoes
of personalism in the Black Lives Matter movement and the 2018 protests against
the migrant family separation policy.
This year saw the release of two works examining Dorothy Day’s life: the
documentary Revolution of the Heart, written, directed, and narrated by Martin
Doblmeier, and a biography, Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century,
by John Loughery and Blythe Randolph. While both offer nuanced considerations
of Day’s life, the documentary seems to aim to bolster the case for her canonization,
while the biography focuses on her bohemian early life, when she longed to become
a novelist equal to her famous literary friends.
Day makes a striking subject for a film, and Revolution of the Heart shows her in
all her iconic glory—statuesque and crowned with a coiled white braid, or, as Garry
Wills once wrote in Esquire, “an awesome woman, tall, lantern-jawed, with Modigliani
eyes.” Of course she’d have hated any attention paid to her looks, just as she scoffed
when anyone suggested she could become a saint (“Bullshit!”). Despite all her
renunciations, she would, however, embrace the title “anarchist.” As the documentary
details, this “grandmother and anarchist” landed on the FBI watchlist of subversives
to be rounded up in the event of a national emergency, because of ideas she espoused,
company she kept, and her participation in demonstrations—including those for
women’s suffrage and against the Vietnam War—that landed her in jail eight times.
Through interviews with Day’s grandchildren and others who knew her, clergy, and
writers and thinkers including Paul Elie, Cornel West, and Jim Wallis, as well as actor
Martin Sheen (who visited Catholic Worker houses for meals in his youth), the film
details how Day converted to Catholicism, prayed for a vocation, began a newspaper
with itinerant French theologian Peter Maurin on a shoestring budget, opened the
first Worker house with little plan or money, and became a devout, uncompromising
figure immersed in social justice movements throughout the world. Loughery and
Randolph’s lucid biography provides greater detail about the welter of controlled
chaos in which Day lived. Everything she attempted was so improbable that if she
had considered practicality, she may never have begun.
In the documentary, Robert Ellsberg, who left college to become managing editor
of The Catholic Worker in the late seventies, recalls once asking Day, “‘How do you
reconcile Catholicism and anarchism?’ She looked at me with a bemused expression
and said, ‘It’s never been a problem for me.’” She didn’t ask permission; she took
it. One of the few institutions she showed reverence for was the Catholic Church,
whose rules she strove to follow almost to the letter—although she challenged her
fellow Catholics to take Jesus’s strenuous demands in the Sermon on the Mount
more seriously. The only point on which she differed with the church significantly
was its doctrine of “just war.” Day believed nonviolence was always essential, and
while she earned praise for her breadlines during the Great Depression, when she
opposed America’s involvement in World War II, many turned against her, canceling
their Catholic Worker subscriptions.
Whether people approved of her or not, Day kept up her work. In one archival
interview, she recounts that the Brooklyn police once brought her a woman who was
filthy and covered with lice from sleeping outside in deplorable conditions. In New
York, one of the richest cities in the world, Catholic Worker houses were often a last
resort for those who had slipped through holes in the social safety net. Day accepted
nearly anyone who showed up at the door. She didn’t believe in overreliance on
government services to take care of the poor; she believed each of us should contribute
to taking care of each other, for the good of our own souls. Her vow of poverty was
an extension of this: she believed that if we remove ourselves from the suffering of
our fellow humans by putting too many layers of wealth and comfort between us
and them, we can never live as Christ wanted us to. And, as Ellsberg puts it, “The
goal of the Worker was not to fix all these people. It was not a social agency… You
just accepted people as they were and made room for them, as long as there was a
modicum of peace.”
Often the houses were chaotic and even dangerous, given the mental illness, lack
of hygiene, addictions, and rough habits of many she welcomed. The way Day ran
her Worker houses embodied Presbyterian pastor and writer Eugene Peterson’s belief
that “People are not problems to be solved. They are mysteries to be explored.”
Jim Wallis notes that Day was not a religious leftist. She was conservative in her
Catholicism, holding to its traditional practices from the time of her conversion in
her twenties. “She was radical in her social, economic, and political views because
of the conservatism of her faith.” Her belief in voluntary poverty grew out of this.
As Benedictine nun and author Joan Chittister observes, “She was witnessing to the
church itself. You taught us this; we’re doing it. Now don’t tell us we’re not Catholic.”
So far, so saintly, right? But some contend that Day will never become a saint
because of the sins of her early years. Both the book and movie sketch the personal
unhappiness of her youth—one lover forced her to have an abortion, after which
she attempted suicide twice. The atheist father of Day’s daughter Tamar refused to
marry her, and so Day, newly Catholic, painfully broke off their relationship when
Tamar was a toddler. During this dark time, Day lit a candle at church and prayed
to discover her vocation. A few days later, Peter Maurin turned up on her doorstep
with a plan to publish a newspaper that would advocate for social change.
The book and movie differ in their portrayals of Day as a mother. The biography
depicts her as being so busy with travel and running her newspaper and Worker
houses that Tamar didn’t always receive the attention she needed and subsequently
ended up adrift, with nine children and in a bad marriage to an alcoholic older man.
But in the documentary Kate Hennessy disavows this take: “My grandmother has
been accused of being an indifferent and neglectful mother, and that is just not what
my mother experienced… Dorothy was heroic in terms of her family obligations.”
Martha Hennessy admits that her mother Tamar experienced sacrifices growing up in
the turmoil of Worker houses but asserts that Tamar was as committed to Dorothy’s
work as her mother was.
Day didn’t like to discuss her hedonistic early years. She spurned writers who wrote
profiles mentioning her frequent visits in her twenties to the Greenwich Village bar
called the Golden Swan, known affectionately in the bohemian demimonde as “the
Hell Hole.” According to Loughery and Randolph, she could “drink most of the other
patrons under the table” and “hold her liquor better than [Eugene] O’Neill.” When
she was in her seventies, she burned a number of papers—personal correspondence
and writing. Perhaps she was trying to conceal her past, as Loughery and Randolph
speculate: “It was not how she wanted Peter Maurin to view her or how she wanted
the young people to think of her.” But another way of looking at Day’s tendency to
bristle over references to her youthful carousing is that she fervently believed in the
forgiveness and absolution provided by confession. After receiving the sacrament of
reconciliation, perhaps she felt she was a new person, and so she should be judged
by the way she lived her final fifty-three years, not her first thirty.
But her first thirty years do make for interesting reading. As the biography delves
into Day’s fascinating, chaotic early life, it’s a treat to learn that she hobnobbed with
Eugene O’Neill, Katherine Anne Porter, W.H. Auden, and other literary greats.
She wrote novels for years, and even a play, without much success; Loughery and
Randolph emphasize that fiction and drama were not her forte. Those of us who
write fiction will feel a pang as her efforts come to nothing and her literary friends
try not to offend her with honest reactions to her bad writing. But after all, if Day
had been as good a novelist or playwright as the company she kept, she may never
have discovered her unique calling.
Day may have failed as a literary writer, but she was a prolific journalist and memoirist
whose words stirred millions. She loved and supported literature, theater, art, and
classical music her whole life, and took solace in the arts. Loughery and Randolph
write, “As she aged, Dorothy’s aesthetic sense didn’t lessen; it deepened. She was
willing to allow herself more time for the pleasures of art.” If Dorothy Day does
become a saint, she could make a splendid patron for artists, people in poverty, pacifists,
single mothers, prisoners, social justice activists, and failed—but persistent—writers.
Are there flaws to the documentary and biography? Perhaps in the interest of
time—and bolstering the case for canonization—the fifty-seven-minute documentary
downplays the darkness of Day’s early years, the craziness and filth of the Worker
houses, and her genuine weaknesses; while the biography, which creates an admirably
balanced portrait, delves at times too far into minutiae and drops an overabundance
of names—though for the most part the names are fascinating ones. Both works
provide a welcome introduction to Day or a further education on her life.
Near the end of her life, Dorothy Day took an interest in the work of Cesar Chavez
among migrant farmworkers in California. “One of the best things that has been
happening in the United States is the strike of the United Farm Workers, headed
by Cesar Chavez,” Day says in the documentary. She traveled to California in 1973
when she was seventy-six to support a Chavez-led grape picker strike, where she was
arrested for the eighth and last time. “I first became a Catholic because I felt that
the Catholic Church was the church of the poor,” Day says in one interview, “and
I still think it’s the church of the poor. I think it’s the church of all the immigrant
populations that came over or were brought over.”
Though neither book nor documentary speculates about how Day would react to
current events, it’s certain that were she alive today, Day would have a thing or two to
say about the perpetually unpassed DREAM Act, which could provide citizenship to
people brought to the United States as children, and about the continued mistreatment
of undocumented immigrants and farm workers.
valkyriejmu's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
tense
medium-paced
4.25
Content Warnings
Moderate: Classism
Minor: Addiction, Alcoholism, and Adult/minor relationship
joshmcd's review against another edition
5.0
This book, more than any other Dorothy Day biography I've read, gets at a truth at the very heart of her Catholic Worker movement: "we don't measure our success, we don't despair, and we don't judge; we simply do the work God intends us to do."
Some writings about Day (including, I would say, her own) fall into something like the classic Catholic Saintwashing syndrome -- putting some gloss over the difficulties inherent in the truly Christ-centered life. Some, especially more recent works, focus on the shortfalls of the movement. Day's own shortcomings as a religious leader, as the anarchist figurehead of a movement, are highlighted in the stories of this most disorganized organization. And this book does not soft-pedal those aspects.
But in acknowledging these worldly shortcomings it puts them too in the proper context. The Catholic Worker is not a social service organization, and it was never intended to be. It stands as an example of what Pope Francis has said he wants the Church itself to be: a field hospital for a damaged and broken world.
Dorothy Day set up the triage unit for that field hospital. It took in the worst, most damaged cases, and gave them a bit of respite. Its successes are not measured in terms of how it changed the world, but perhaps in terms of how it changed individuals who went on to change their small part of the world.
Day's story as it is presented here is the story of small successes and failures which add up to an attempt at a Christian life. And it is in this -- not the glossy holy-card image of a Saint but the messy but well-meaning life of a human being at her best and at her worst -- that we can find some inspiration.
Some writings about Day (including, I would say, her own) fall into something like the classic Catholic Saintwashing syndrome -- putting some gloss over the difficulties inherent in the truly Christ-centered life. Some, especially more recent works, focus on the shortfalls of the movement. Day's own shortcomings as a religious leader, as the anarchist figurehead of a movement, are highlighted in the stories of this most disorganized organization. And this book does not soft-pedal those aspects.
But in acknowledging these worldly shortcomings it puts them too in the proper context. The Catholic Worker is not a social service organization, and it was never intended to be. It stands as an example of what Pope Francis has said he wants the Church itself to be: a field hospital for a damaged and broken world.
Dorothy Day set up the triage unit for that field hospital. It took in the worst, most damaged cases, and gave them a bit of respite. Its successes are not measured in terms of how it changed the world, but perhaps in terms of how it changed individuals who went on to change their small part of the world.
Day's story as it is presented here is the story of small successes and failures which add up to an attempt at a Christian life. And it is in this -- not the glossy holy-card image of a Saint but the messy but well-meaning life of a human being at her best and at her worst -- that we can find some inspiration.