What we’re reading this month: September 2024

Dorothy Day: Radical Devotion

By Jeffry Odell Korgen (Paulist Press, 2024)

Dorothy Day wrote at least three autobiographies, and there are more than twice as many biographies about her, not to mention the diary entries and articles she wrote during her lifetime, detailing her experiences and spiritual insights. But Jeffry Odell Korgen’s new graphic novel, Dorothy Day: Radical Devotion, written in collaboration with Conventual Franciscan Friar Mike Lasky and with luminous illustrations by Christopher Cardinale, brings a fresh perspective to Day’s life.

Korgen begins his story at a formative moment of Day’s childhood: the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906. He then leaps ahead a decade, to Dorothy Day’s career in New York City as a journalist. Korgen covers Day’s conversion to Catholicism, her introduction to Peter Maurin, the founding of the Catholic Worker newspaper, its rise in popularity during the Great Depression, its fall from popularity during World War II, and its resurgence during the Cold War and Vietnam War years.

Korgen was coordinator for the diocesan phase of Day’s canonization cause, from 2014 to 2021, and his research into her life details her encounters with such figures as civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, singer Joan Baez, and Mother Teresa. He even relates an obscure anecdote about the appearance of poet W. H. Auden on a literary game show in order to donate his winnings to cover the Catholic Worker’s unpaid bill.

Korgen includes an epilogue that offers a peek into the process of getting a “living saint” to become a canonized one and ends by highlighting the work of those who are still taking up Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day’s mission of reconstructing the social order: cooperatives such as Industrial Commons in North Carolina and Catholic Worker communities from Indiana to Iowa.

—Renée Roden

The Catholic Church and the Struggle for Racial Justice

By Matt Kappadakunnel (Paulist Press, 2024)

What is the role of the church in the fight for the dignity of all, in the form of racial justice? Matt Kappadakunnel powerfully answers this question in his dynamic work The Catholic Church and the Struggle for Racial Justice: A Prophetic Call. Weaving personal experience, an analysis of U.S. bishops’ statements on race, and spiritual reflection, Kappadakunnel calls us all to live up to our baptismal call to ensure every person is affirmed as made in the image of God. If we are to live out the true catholic nature of our faith, we would do well to read this book.

Beginning with illustrating how racism is a sin against the image of God in all of us and sharing his personal experiences with racism, Kappadakunnel demonstrates the harm racism inflicts on people and the church. Focusing on the church in the United States, he considers the division that racism continues to cause. This division, he notes, is found in the disconnect between statements from the U.S. church hierarchy and laypeople. While the U.S. bishops have released statements about racism, the church’s practical action hasn’t lived up to these promises, and this undermines the church’s potential to ensure the dignity of all people. Kappadakunnel answers this by calling us all to the unity to which the Holy Trinity invites us.

As a Black American Catholic woman, it is refreshing to see this clear invitation for the church, particularly the U.S. church, to live up to its vocation to treat everyone as created in the image of God. Kappadakunnel’s book speaks both to the experience of the marginalized and to those privileged by the structure of sin that is racism, inviting the church to make the change needed to live its gospel call.

—Rana Irby

Briefly noted:

How to Love a Forest: The Bittersweet Work of Tending a Changing World

By Ethan Tapper (Broadleaf Books, 2024)

Forester Ethan Tapper walks readers through the fragile and resilient community that is a forest, asking what it means to live in a time during which ecosystems are in retreat.