Dorothy Day As An Example of Character

New York Times columnist David Brooks has been writing and lecturing on character in recent months, finding inspiration in, among others, Dorothy Day. Here is an excerpt from his most recent article, The Moral Bucket List:

ENERGIZING LOVE Dorothy Day led a disorganized life when she was young: drinking, carousing, a suicide attempt or two, following her desires, unable to find direction. But the birth of her daughter changed her. She wrote of that birth, “If I had written the greatest book, composed the greatest symphony, painted the most beautiful painting or carved the most exquisite figure I could not have felt the more exalted creator than I did when they placed my child in my arms.”

That kind of love decenters the self. It reminds you that your true riches are in another. Most of all, this love electrifies. It puts you in a state of need and makes it delightful to serve what you love. Day’s love for her daughter spilled outward and upward. As she wrote, “No human creature could receive or contain so vast a flood of love and joy as I often felt after the birth of my child. With this came the need to worship, to adore.”

She made unshakable commitments in all directions. She became a Catholic, started a radical newspaper, opened settlement houses for the poor and lived among the poor, embracing shared poverty as a way to build community, to not only do good, but be good. This gift of love overcame, sometimes, the natural self-centeredness all of us feel.

NY Times Sunday Review, April 11, 2015 

The whole article may be found here.

The Lustig Family

The Lustig Family by Dorothy Day, New York Call, Nov. 1916

This is a partial transcript of one of the articles in The New York Call with Dorothy Day's byline.

Wolfe Lustig – it’s a husky sounding name.  But the man is a rattling bag of bones.  Day and night he lies in his bed and wonders why God doesn’t kill him quick.  For the first time in weeks, he propped himself up in bed yesterday to have his picture taken.  Look at it.

Pauline, the eldest child, is six.  Jakie comes next.  He’s four. Little Maurice, with the schmoochy face, is three and the cuddly baby with the big dark eyes was sentenced to life only five months ago.  Her name is Yetta.

Lustig was operated on two years ago. He doesn't know why. But he does know that the operation didn't turn out right and he has been in bed ever since.

His Wife - Sick Too!

His wife is sick, too, but she has to drag herself around and rub him with alcohol and make beef tea. Her face is puffed with neuralgia. The cold, stale air of the room is maddening. Daily, she goes out to peek at the push carts, hoping vaguely that prices have fallen. She comes in and her face and her heart hurt.

Beer and Holiness (Part II)

Beer and Holiness Converge in the Life of This Young Entrepreneur

A Profile of Luis Gordon

This is the second part of a post that began here.

A successful entrepreneur by his late 20s, Luis paid himself a high but not outrageous salary, enjoyed wearing good clothes, drove a flashy, yellow car and was actively engaged in politics promoting his view of the world in the rough and tumble politics of Spain in the late ‘20s.

The Gordon’s had been Catholic all the way back to Scotland which most likely contributed to Arthur’s decision to move to Spain 200 years earlier. Luis himself was a devout Catholic with an authentic piety. His reputation at home was "A treasure of a man… serious and formal, yet friendly and affectionate…Everyone in the family regarded him as a saint."

Floyd Dell on G. K. Chesteron, Part 2

A month ago, I posted the first part of Floyd Dell's review of G. K. Chesterton's "A Short History of England."  Here's the rest:

The philosophy of Christianity is generally – save in the Calvinistic sects – a free-will philosophy.  A good Christian wants to believe in miracles.  And a good Christian who happens to be a revolutionist wants to live in a world where the miracle of revolution is possible – where the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.  Not for him the cut-and-dried universe of Marxian determinism!  And not for some millions of other excellent people who, I am sure, would gladly take their places behind the first barricade of the Revolution.  Professor Milyukov, it is said, sat in a balcony and watched the Petrograd mob go against the machine-guns.  “It will all be over in half an hour,” he said.  He knew too much to believe that a mob could suddenly overthrow the solid tyranny of Tsarism.  But the mob didn’t know.  And so it went and did it.  Since then we have learned that success of the Russian revolution was, for a lot of reasons, inevitable, predestined, economically determined.  But for about twenty-four hours what was needed was Christian courage and the faith that is beyond knowledge.

Floyd Dell by John Sloane (1914)

It is characteristic of this mode of thought, however, that it does not wait for the Revolution, but rather continually creates revolutionary forms of action, some hopeless and some fruitful, out of its ever-youthful energies.

 [Mr. Chesterton champions] the movement for the creation or restoration of small peasant holdings of land [and] Guild Socialism intending to restore to labor the chief of its medieval virtues, the ancient virtue of handicraftsmanship. It will be noted that the mind which is free from the obsession of the Present is free to conceive a restoration of the Past.  To the determinist there is something at once sacrilegious and wasteful in this attempt, which he describes as “setting back the clock.” To the free-willist, however, this is no clockwork universe.  Going back to the path from which we wandered a few hundred years ago may be the most progressive thing to do – particularly if we have wandered into a bog.

Beer and Holiness

Beer and Holiness Converge in the Life of This Entrepreneur
A Profile of Luis Gordon

Somewhere in the furthest branches of the family tree there might have been gin but the fashionable homes of England awakened to a taste for sherry and by the middle of the 18^th Century Arthur Gordon had moved to Spain to satisfy this thirst.  A prosperous business was handed from Gordon to Gordon but the talent wore off in the 19^th Century and the business collapsed leaving Juan Gordon, Luis’ father, to start over with very little.

Luis was born, the tenth of fifteen children, in Cadiz in August, 1898 but his father’s import business failed, perhaps due to some chicanery of a competitor. The family moved around Spain during Luis’ formative years, definitively settling in Madrid in 1915 when Luis was 17.

Nothing is known of his university education which, most likely, took place in Madrid and concentrated on Industrial Engineering. In September, 1922, Luis enrolled in a graduate program at Ecole de Brasserie, Nancy, France.  The most prestigious brew school outside of Germany, it had been founded in 1893 as a department of the University of Nancy and specialized in the low temperature fermentation of beer popular in Germany (in comparison to high temperature fermentation in Great Britain).

Ecole de Brasserie, Class of 1923. Luis is in the front standing row, third from the left

The Economist Offers Advice of a Torturer

Yesterday, The Economist send out a tweet quoting Francis Bacon with some advice about getting information out of people.  

Bacon was well experienced at this.  For instance, in April, 1597, he signed the report of the examining board at the Tower of London as a witness of the interrogation of Fr. John Gerard, a Jesuit who later wrote:

Floyd Dell on G.K. Chesterton (Part I)

One of Dorothy Day's friends in Greenwich Village was Floyd Dell who at the time had a well deserved, national reputation for his book reviews.  Floyd, a Socialist at age 16, became the editor of The Friday Review of Books in 1906 at the age of 23 and saw that he could contribute to setting the trajectory of American culture in the 20th Century through his book reviews and consciously promoted those books offering alternatives to the established American narrative.

An agnostic (if not a pagan), a big fan of women's emancipation ("A guy doesn't have to marry the girl") and a serial seducer, his most favorite socialist author was G.K. Chesterton despite his "peculiar religious prejudices."  Here are some abridged excerpts from his 1918 review of Chesterton's "A Short History of England":
 
G. K. Chesterton is one of the exponents of a mode of revolutionary thought which is older than Marxian socialism, which in all of its phases and sects numbers millions of adherents and which has made a profound impress upon revolutionary history.  Yet this mode of thought is not exclusively Anarchist or Syndicalist, or even extremist.  It is not a movement, but a philosophy, bearing a peculiar relationship to that which underlies scientific socialism.  It has been generally either hostile to or contemptuous of the aims and methods of the Socialist movement, and it still competes as formidably as ever with Marxian socialism for the soul of man.

It cannot be described in a phrase, except perhaps by saying that it really is revolutionary in its essence, which Marxian or scientific socialism is not.  It will be remembered that the Marxian theory was rooted in Hegelian evolutionism and is hence evolutionary in spirit.  But those two words have become so obscured by much use that the best way of indicating the very real and profound chasm which divides the energies of the movement to which we all belong, is perhaps to say that half of the vital intellects of this century, as of the last, do not, and cannot, and will not believe in economic determinism.  The refuse it credence, not because it is economic, but because it is determinism.  They can and must, and do believe in free-will.