Welcome to the July issue of the Regenerative Reader, a bi-monthly newsletter from The Maurin Academy for Regenerative Studies. This issue of the Regenerative Reader features descriptions of upcoming classes and other ongoing programming, and several essays from Dr. Laurie M. Johnson, Renée Roden, and Zach Whitworth. You will also find announcements about upcoming Catholic Worker gatherings in the Midwest this fall, including the first Peter Maurin conference in Chicago, IL.
Peter Maurin Conference: September 6-8, 2024
For Immediate Release
June 17, 2024
Chicago Parish Announces the First Conference Dedicated to Peter Maurin, Co-Founder of the Catholic Worker Movement
Chicago, Il. – The first academic conference dedicated to the life, thought and influence of Peter Maurin, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, will take place in September in Chicago at Mary, Mother of God Parish. The Peter Maurin Conference is the collaboration between Mary, Mother of God Parish, in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago, the Hank Center for The Catholic Intellectual Heritage at the University of Loyola Chicago, and DePaul University’s Department of Catholic Studies.
The American journalist Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin, a French agitator and author, founded The Catholic Worker newspaper in 1933. Their ideas caught fire with Catholic laity and secular workers in the middle of the Great Depression. Since the paper’s first printing, more than 200 communities–farms, households, and houses of hospitality–have begun to put Day and Maurin’s ideas of hospitality, the works of mercy, and an economic culture based on the Mystical Body of Christ into action. Servant of God Dorothy Day is on her way to canonization. And, in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, Day described Maurin’s spirit and ideas as altering the course of her life.
“You can safely say without Peter Maurin there would be no Catholic Worker movement,” said James Murphy. Murphy, director of Canterbury House, a house of hospitality inspired by the Catholic Worker tradition that is part of Mary Mother of God Parish, began planning for a conference dedicated to Peter Maurin five years ago with Matthieu Langlois, a PhD student in history at Fordham University. “Peter’s program of cult, culture, and cultivation is just as relevant to the Church and world today as it was 90 years ago,” said Murphy, “His program points the way toward a radical renewal of the Church, meaning, as Peter meant it, to get back to its roots.”
The organizers said the purpose of holding an academic conference at a parish was to connect Maurin’s approach to the life of a church community. “It is fitting that this conference is held at a parish, where people from the Catholic Worker movement, the academy, and the church can reflect together on Maurin’s vision,” said Mark Franzen, director of St. Gregory’s Hall, a cultural center at Mary, Mother of God Parish. “How do we find inspiration in the Church’s social doctrine to radically transform ourselves, our institutions, and society as a whole? That is what Maurin wanted us to ask.” Maurin proposed parishes and houses of hospitality become places where the rich and poor could encounter one another and where scholars could “collaborate with the workers in the making of a path from things as they are to things as they should be.”
In this spirit, roundtable discussions–a Catholic Worker tradition to promote “clarification of thought”–will replace the traditional paper presentations and panels. Lincoln Rice, author of The Forgotten Radical Peter Maurin, an annotated volume of Maurin’s essays, will provide a keynote address on the system of ideas found in Maurin’s first published “Easy Essays.” “Many know Maurin for his quirky sayings,” Rice said. “But Maurin has a coherent system of thought that would benefit Catholic Workers to understand in order to guide their work, and for anyone concerned about industrialization, impersonalization and wealth inequality.”
The conference will be held at the St. Gregory the Great campus of Mary, Mother of God Parish September 6-8, 2024. Workers or scholars interested in submitting a roundtable discussion proposal should see the conference website. Registration for the conference, submissions for roundtable proposals, and more details can be found at the Gregory Hall website: www.stgregoryhall.org/maurin.
Media Contact
Renée Roden, Press Coordinator
reneedarline@gmail.com | 952.693.6957
The Harry Murray Sessions
The Maurin Academy is thrilled to announce an upcoming series, The Harry Murray Sessions.
Harry Murray will be teaching four classes over the next year, once every three months. The first session will be held on Monday, August 5 at 7 p.m. US Central Time, live on Zoom. He will be teaching about the intersections of the co-founder of the Catholic Worker Dorothy Day and French philosopher Jacques Derrida on hospitality. Catholic Workers get free access to all of our live and recorded content, just email us!
Harry Murray is a professor emeritus of sociology at Nazareth University in Rochester, New York. He spent two years at Unity Kitchen in Syracuse in the late 1970s. He is the author of Do Not Neglect Hospitality, which recounts his experiences living and working at three different Catholic Worker houses. He ran the Saturday meal and St. Joseph House in Rochester for over thirty years and was incarcerated in the Salvation Army with Peter DeMott for three months for protesting the Gulf War.
Guest Essay by Zach Whitworth
A brief note from the editors: The guest editorials published in the Maurin Academy Newsletter are identified as being of general interest to our readers. They do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Maurin Academy.
Zach Whitworth hails from the Umpqua Valley of the Pacific Northwest.
This photo of Zach features a corticolous lichen on a coastal redwood. 🙂
No commentary in the New Testament remains more materially relevant or is so frequently forgotten as Jesus’s repudiation of riches. Recorded thrice in the conventional canon (Matthew 19:16–30; Mark 10:17–31; Luke 18:18–30), the tale of the rich man details a trial of propriety, by which Jesus defines the depravity of private property.
The rich man inquires to Jesus what is yet required to attain eternal life, having purportedly practiced the principle commandments, to which Jesus replies that the man must relinquish his riches to the poor. The man leaves forlorn, for he cannot fathom the forfeiture of his fortune. Jesus then explains in maxim the immense difficulty, even impossibility, of a rich man entering the Kingdom of God.
The apocryphal Gospel of the Nazarenes, providing a variation of Matthew, expands the story to stress the context of the conversation between Jesus and the rich man. Turning to him, Jesus chastises the man: ”How can you say ‘I have performed the law and the prophets’? seeing that it is written in the law ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself,’ and look, many of your brothers, sons of Abraham, are clad with dung, dying for hunger, and your house is full of much goods, and there goes out therefrom nought at all unto them.” Jesus here implies that riches find their correlate in wretchedness. So long as one remains rich, no commandment has correctly been considered.
In a 1795 tract titled Agrarian Justice, the revolutionary Thomas Paine writes of the rich as a parasite on the public. “It is wrong,” he argues, “to say God made rich and poor; he made only male and female; and he gave them the earth for their inheritance.” Indeed, this disparity is not determined in nature but is a social formation. The earth is the common treasury for all life-forms, and humankind has an inherent right to its inheritance. Landed property encloses that earth, making a monopoly of material means. Such property thus strips society of its source of sustenance, claiming exclusive sovereignty and selling the spoils to a starved populace. So, too, is personal property a product of social life. “Separate an individual from society,…and he cannot acquire personal property,” Paine asserts. “He cannot be rich.”
Forty-five years following the publication of Agrarian Justice, the famed utopian Robert Owen pens his 1840 manifesto, maintaining Paine’s position that private property produces and perpetuates poverty. But Owen sees in the property system a culture of commercial competition, by which social conditions create a community of cardinal sin. Envy, jealousy, gluttony, and the rest become the basic attitude of all. “There can be nothing deserving the name of virtue, of justice, or of real knowledge in society,” he reasons, “as long as private property and inequality in rank and condition shall constitute component parts of it.”
The social and economic relations in turn condition cognition. In 1894, the socialist William Morris notes a potent pessimism apparent in his period. The luxurious greed of the rich takes shape proportionally to the abject misery of the poor masses, and in the eyes of many observers, this seems to be the end of life itself. There is no superior system. Rational meaning in history is misplaced, and one cannot conceive a future freed of capital. “As far as I could tell,” says Morris, “scarce anyone seemed to think it worth while to struggle against such a consummation of civilization.”
The foul facts of riches, of accumulated private property, ripped from a common earth, lie implicitly in the possessions indicted by Jesus. He recognizes riches as exactly antithetical to his teachings—private property kills one’s neighbors. It is theft. It tells no truth. It honors no ancestor. It forwards no faith in one’s fellow. The renouncement of riches is not an additional commandment but constitutes the supreme social need upon which all other commandments are contingent.
Owen commends the utopian communities of the 18th and 19th centuries, who established small egalitarian societies across North America, many preaching a millenarian gospel of Jesus. He especially praises the Shakers, the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing, for their internal elimination of private property and hierarchy, arranged in accordance with the acts of the Apostles (Acts 4:32–37). However, after attempting to inaugurate his own utopian communities, Owen found a critical flaw in this communitarian movement. “They were unconscious of the obstacles which the old system of society had placed in their progress,” he indicates, “and [those obstacles] must be removed before any permanent progress can be made in a system of society without private property and inequality of rank and condition.” Even the most persistent and principled parties in question only constructed their colonies within the will of the commanding economy, as cooperatively-owned private property, and in their pioneering projects they unwittingly propagated proprietarian power.
It is difficult for the rich man to enter the Kingdom of God, not by virtue of his affluence, but due to the terrible trouble of ridding himself of riches. In this system of private property, we cannot so easily do away with it or absolve ourselves of the advantages it gains us at the expense of others. We are all implicated in the crime, the sin, of propriety.
Jesus tells us that it is impossible for men to save themselves—indeed, to simply give up one’s personal holdings is not enough, nor is it the point. Few are so bold as the socialist saints of the late 19th century, those like the beloved revolutionaries Paul Kaplan and Fermín Salvochea, who relinquished their material privileges and died in destitution, offering their whole lives in service of the struggle for justice. Their hopes did not end with individual morality. Rather, they believed all humankind could come to achieve this justice. Jesus, Paine, Owen, and Morris provide us a prophetic prescription. When we abolish the system of private property, we will all be a hundred times richer.
John Paul II Catholic Worker Farm Participates in Perennial Atlas Civic Science Project
By: Dr. Laurie M. Johnson
At the JPII Farm in Kansas City, Mo., and also in Manhattan, KS, we are participating in the first year of a three year civic science experiment conducted by the Land Institute in Salina, KS. The Land Institute’s primary mission is to develop strong, low-maintenance perennial grains and pulses that can adapt to climate change and require far less “inputs.”
Conventional farming often involves cultivation/tilling, frequent re-planting, irrigation, and the use of fertilizers and pesticides. Perennial crops can last for years through over-wintering, self-seeding, and other processes, and as a result are hardier and more adaptive to a changing environment. Imagine how things would change if our wheat crops, for instance, were basically like tall grass, and all we needed to do most of the time was repeatedly harvest them. That’s the Land Institute vision.
Recently the Land Institute called for people across the US to participate in a crowd sourcing experiment to learn the performance of some perennial crops, compared with annual versions of the same crops. We received plants and seeds for crops like sunflower, lentils, sainfoin and flax, and we were asked to give each plant an approximately 4 x 4 area. We then need to keep the growing plants weeded and observe their performance at least once a month. We upload data and pictures to citsci.org to record our observations. The Land Institute will hopefully be able to use all this data to determine what crops perform better in different climates, types of soil, and intensities of human effort.
The Land Institute is a favorite institution of Wendell Berry, whose work we greatly admire. Berry has visited the Land Institute several times. In works like The Unsettling of America, Berry advocates for the health of the land and is deeply critical of conventional farming practices for their distorted and polluting uses of the land. He is an advocate of traditional diversified farming as a system of true cultivation and husbandry of the land. Spencer and Laurie recently finished a class on Berry’s Unsettling.
We are proud to be collaborating with the Land Institute’s Perennial Atlas experiment and hope that it yields some fruitful results that could help us feed people in a world of increasingly rapid weather changes.
Reading Marx with Jakob Hanschu
Upcoming Sessions:
July 31 – Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (Grundrisse selections)
August 14 – Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (Grundrisse selections)
August 28 – Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (Grundrisse selections)
September – Ethnological Notebooks
October – Ethnological Notebooks
The focus for the 2024 Marx Reading Group will be Marx’s writings on Non-Capitalist Social Formations. Topics discussed will include the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the accelerationist vibes of Marx and Engels’ 1840s writings, modes of production and non-linear history, Marx’s later rejection of evolutionary models, Marx’s Ethnological Notebooks, and Marx’s comments on several of the actually-existing non-capitalist social formations of his time. These discussions will be supplemented by concrete examples of non-capitalist social formations drawn from the historic and ethnographic record. Patrons interested in attending the 2024 sessions of the Marx Reading Group should subscribe at either the “Salt of the Earth” or “Worker-Scholar” levels.
Dustbowl Diatribes Podcast with Dr. Laurie M. Johnson and Spencer Hess
For season three of Dustbowl Diatribes, we’re covering the various theories about Techno-Feudalism and looking into the current state of the Catholic Worker movement. In short, our hypotheses are that the coming period of capitalism can be accurately characterized as quasi-feudal and that the Catholic Worker movement is currently hamstrung by a radical split between those adhering to Peter Maurin’s comprehensive vision for constructing a Christian social order and those adhering to Ammon Hennacy’s Tolstoyan/Radical Liberal vision for protesting our way towards social justice.
Along those lines, Laurie and Spencer recently talked to two long-time Catholic Workers–Lincoln Rice and Benjamin Peters. They’ve also interviewed David Holmgren (one of the “co-originators” of Permaculture about different “energy descent scenarios”, and with the Traditionalist Catholic John Rao about Catholic Social Teaching and his beef with French personalism.
The Secret Grange: A Dustbowl Diatribes Podcast and Hotline for Patrons only
Patreons supporters have access to monthly digest/recap episodes as well as access to the Granger Danger Hotline, where they can field comments, queries, criticisms (constructive or destructive), or even errant musings.
We look forward to engaging more with patrons and seeing where the dustbowl will take us.
The Longer View with Dr. Laurie M. Johnson
Laurie’s changing the format of her monthly sessions for 2024. On the first Thursday of each month, from 7-8:30 p.m. US Central Time, she’ll be on Zoom live to discuss a current event or topic with Patreon members only. These discussions will draw on the Longer View of the history of political philosophy. Patrons can suggest new topics they’d like to discuss by messaging us on Patreon or by joining our free Slack group and going to the political philosophy channel there (which has the added benefit of more interaction with our crew and other members). She’ll announce the month’s topic about a week ahead of time, on our Patreon feed.
All of the past recordings of these talks are available to our patrons at the Salt-of-the-Earth and Worker-Scholar tier.
Upcoming Sessions at 7 p.m. US Central Time, live on Zoom:
August 1
September 5
October 3
Communio Study Circle
This group focuses on Ressourcement and Communio theology and how it can change our understanding of the world and our own way of life. Ressourcement means returning to the original, authoritative sources of Christianity and bringing them to bear on our own times.
We’ll meet monthly on the third Saturday in person and on Zoom to discuss a book, article or other selection, and once per quarter, we will discuss the latest issue of Communio: International Catholic Review, focusing on one or two articles. This group is Catholic-weighted but not exclusively so, because Ressourcement theology is of great interest to many Protestants and people of other faiths. Our sessions will meet for approximately two hours, starting at 4 p.m. US CT. We will record for those who have to miss a meeting.
As of late, some updates:
Our reading group recently finished the late David L. Schindler’s, Heart of the World, Center of the Church, at our November meeting. In December we read and discussed a Communio article related to the encyclical, Laudato Si. As for January and February, we read A Personalist Manifesto by Emmanuel Mounier. We’ve recently finished Laborem Exercens by Pope John Paul II and
Heavenly Participation: The Weaving of a Sacramental Tapestry by Hans Boersma.
Now (and always) would be a great time to join this reading group!
This Group is Currently Reading:
On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ: Selected Writings from St. Maximus the Confessor (St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press “Popular Patristics” Series)
Upcoming Meetings:
August 17
September 21
Membership
We are working hard to provide top-quality participative and distributed media experiences. Becoming a Patreon member has benefits for us all, and it helps us to increase our offerings. You can become a member today and experience all our member benefits immediately. Non-members are always welcome to sign up for course participation through Eventbrite or to purchase a download from our course archive on our website. Please, sign up on:
https://www.patreon.com/maurinacademy
Patreon Tiers:
Salt of the Earth ($5/month)
- Access to Laurie’s monthly live sessions “Pints with Plato,” our growing course content archive, and all previously recorded content.
Worker-Scholar ($10/month)
- Access to all new (live) course content, and all previous content.
Find us on Eventbrite by searching “The Maurin Academy” for upcoming events. Events go live on Eventbrite one month before the start date.
Catholic Workers worldwide have access to all the programming we do at The Maurin Academy. Simply email us at maurinacademy@gmail.com to request entry to an upcoming event or recordings or past events.
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What we’ve been Reading
