Unruly Saint: Dorothy Day’s Radical Vision and Its Challenge for Our Times

Mayfield (The Myth of the American Dream), a teaching fellow at the Center for Faith and Justice, delivers a timely meditation on Catholic activist Dorothy Day. Born to a middle-class family in Chicago at the turn of the 20th century, Day dropped out of college to become a muckraking journalist and moved in politically radical, bohemian circles. Mayfield chronicles how Day’s conversion to Catholicism and her friendship with anarchist Peter Maurin inspired her in 1933 to found the Catholic Worker newspaper, which combined her religious passion with political activism. The paper, Mayfield contends, grew into a movement of voluntary poverty and hospitality that provided food, shelter, and community to those in need. Mayfield reflects on Day’s influence on her own faith, recounting how discovering Day’s writing challenged her to hold Christians accountable to the social justice message of the gospels. The substantial, briskly told narrative uses Day’s story as a case study in progressive Christianity, reminding readers that a Christian left has long existed at the margins, “furiously impatient with all that was wrong in the world.” Incisive and rousing, this should be required reading for social justice–minded Christians. (Nov.)