Website Updates:

For those of us who study and work at schools and universities, the spring semester is in full swing! As I write this missive from the library at the University of Notre Dame, there’s a happy buzz of activity around the circulation desk, and I know of at least two professors on campus who have assigned texts by Dorothy to their classes this term. At the Guild, we’ve received a number of requests for recommended book lists for high school and college courses as well as personal enrichment for those who desire to deepen their engagement with Dorothy’s life and legacy and those who are meeting her for the first time. This past week, we added a selected bibliography page to the Guild’s website with purchase and reading links and a few recommendations to start you off. We’ll continue to update this page with annotations and additional works, but we were too excited to wait any longer to share it with you. Happy reading!

We’re continuing to develop our website to offer additional resources that you can use for your own learning and formation as well as to share Dorothy’s witness with others. Last year, our wonderful Manhattan College interns developed a beautiful and informative brochure that gives a brief introduction to Dorothy’s life and the history and aims of the Dorothy Day Guild. You can view the brochure on our Guild History page and download and print copies to share with your home communities for free! Thank you, Rebecca and Joanna, for your creative work designing this brochure and sourcing the text. Our thanks go as well to our co-chair, Deirdre Cornell, for the editorial guidance and mentorship she provided to our student interns who have given so much time and talent to the work of the Dorothy Day Guild this past year!

Events (ours and others):

Our Lenten book club begins next month! We’ve updated our events page to include more information about the reading group that Anne Klejment will host to read Dorothy’s spiritual autobiography, The Long Loneliness over four Sunday evenings in March. We were so pleased to receive so much interest last month, but as some of you noticed, we forgot to mention that this book club will meet online! Join us from anywhere from 8-9 pm Eastern/7-8 pm Central on March 3rd, 10th, 17th, and 24th to discuss this modern spiritual classic, guided by Anne’s historical expertise, and sign up here to receive the reading schedule, Zoom link, and additional materials.

If you want to spend time reading The Long Loneliness in community with other seekers this spring, but Sunday nights don’t work for you, we also learned that the Spiritual Renewal Center in Syracuse, NY is hosting a Wednesday evening reading group from 4-5 pm Eastern time. You can join them online or in person at 1342 Lancaster Avenue, Syracuse, New York 13210. There is no need to RSVP, but you can call them at 315-472-6546 for further information. It’s great to see such widespread interest in Dorothy’s life and writing!

We also learned of two other events which we think you might be interested in checking out, both taking place on Saturday, April 13th (we hate to make you choose!). The Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Loyola University Chicago is hosting a Peter Maurin conference to examine the life and work of Dorothy’s beloved mentor and friend. The organizers write that Peter’s “program of action consisted of roundtable discussions for the clarification of thought, houses of hospitality where the works of mercy could be performed, and agronomic universities... These topics will be discussed in a roundtable, personalist way-- in the spirit of Peter Maurin.” The event is free and open to the public, so if you’re local to the Midwest, we hope you can attend!

For those in the Northeast, the Center at Mariandale is hosting a day-long conference entitled “Revolution of the Heart: The Spirituality of Dorothy Day” to explore questions such as “How does her radical spirituality – grounded in volunteer poverty, non-violence, eucharistic devotion, and activism – speak to people of this day and age?” and “How might she be a wisdom figure in the contemporary world which is often deemed as secular, materialistic, and techno-centered?” This conference will feature Guild advisory committee members Martha Hennessy and Robert Ellsberg as guest speakers and is co-sponsored by our friends at Manhattan College. 

We hate to present you with such a tough decision, but we know both conferences will be fabulous spaces for fellowship, learning, and clarification of thought!

Further reading recommendations:

We’d like to draw your attention to a few new pieces which have come out since we wrote to you last month. Today is the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord, also known in some parts of the world as Candlemas. This feast, which comes forty days after the Nativity of the Lord, marks the final day of the Christmas and Epiphany season. All good things come to end (for this liturgical year, anyway), but we do have one last Christmas reflection to share with you! Luke Stocking writes at the Canadian Catholic Register on the spiritual necessity of rest and contemplation, and Dorothy as an exemplar of the active-contemplative vocation. He writes, 

“If I take time out from my work to enjoy a book, or share good food and fun with my family, it is because I desire these same things for the whole world. If I create time for prayer and reflection to be in the presence of God, it is because I dream of a world where everyone has an experience of that same presence. My retreats and times of rest are reflections of the world I want.”

You can read his column, "Basket of adorables by basking in God," on the Canadian Catholic Register’s website.

We also loved this opinion piece from the Des Moines Register, "You and I have responsibility to the immigrant and the refugee" by professor and community mobilizer Jason Lief. So often in contemporary political discourse, we throw around phrases like “personal responsibility” and concepts like subsidiarity to deny our mutual belonging to the Mystical Body of Christ. Dorothy, however, “discovered in Catholic social teaching [a] call to take responsibility for our brothers and sisters — for our neighbors — because every human being is created in the image of God and endowed with dignity, not because of anything they do or don’t do, but simply because they are loved by God.” Dorothy’s anarchist ethos is one of deep commitment which reminds us that “caring for the immigrant and refugee in this country is not the responsibility of the government, nor is it the responsibility of the church. Caring for the immigrant and refugee is our responsibility — yours and mine.” 

Thanks Jason, for this powerful and timely reminder. In this season when so many people around the world have been forced from their homes by armed conflict, climate change, and dearth of opportunity, we can remember that Jesus shared these experiences during his life on earth. On this last day of a long and generous Christmas season, let’s ask Dorothy to help us take up our responsibility and remember that when we welcome our immigrant and refugee brothers and sisters, we welcome Jesus.

Finally, we are so pleased to share a beautiful piece recently published in the liturgical magazine Adoremus, by Catholic Worker and Dorothy Day Guild advisory committee member Carmina Chapp. "Dorothy Day: Faithful Daughter of the Church-- Faithful to the Prayer of the Church" is a rich exploration of Dorothy’s sacramental devotion and the Benedictine charism of prayer and work in which Dorothy found a spiritual home. Dorothy’s radical witness was sustained by a rich prayer life grounded in the liturgies of the Church. As Carmina writes, “Day’s commitment to the liturgical practice of the Church empowered her to boldly spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ in both word and action. Catholic doctrine and social teaching permeated everything she did.”

At the Dorothy Day Guild, we have often said that Dorothy is “a saint for our time.” Dorothy’s spiritual and moral commitment to nonviolence, voluntary poverty, and hospitality has refreshed and re-presented the Gospel for so many of us, enabling us to see the life of Christ for what it truly is– Good News. Dorothy does not stand alone at some point in the past. Her witness compels something from us in the present. “The point of her life, however, was to show that every human being not only is called to be holy, but actually can be holy, by the grace of God—grace obtained in the participation of the sacraments,” Carmina writes. Dorothy “was convinced that Catholicism radically lived is the only answer to our human misery.” Many thanks, Carmina, for sharing such a fine work of scholarship and personal reflection with our readers!