Course Description
In 1932 Dorothy Day was casting about for a cause to serve. A recent convert to Catholicism, she had given up any hope of a life with Foster Batterham, and she was searching for a way to live out her faith. While in Washington D.C. she prayed for direction: “There I offered up a special prayer, a prayer which came with tears and with anguish, that some way would open up for me to use what talents I possessed for my fellow workers, for the poor.” When she arrived back in New York, waiting there on her doorstep was her inspiration: Peter Maurin. Maurin was a French-born vagabond philosopher who had embraced voluntary poverty as a religious discipline. Maurin was extremely well-read and had a prodigious understanding of Catholic social thought and of the philosophical underpinnings of the Catholic sacramental imagination. Day and Maurin started houses of hospitality, farming communes, and the Catholic Worker newspaper. Most of Maurin’s extant writings can be found published in that newspaper in the form of what Maurin called “Easy Essays”: rhythmic rhyming poems of a few stanzas, conveying in simple form his observations. At first glance, they might seem little better than doggerel, but Maurin was writing in a newspaper, for working people, and in order to keep his texts terse and accessible, he sometimes made only oblique references to his knowledge of the Catholic intellectual tradition.
In this course, we will examine together some of Maurin’s ideas on the crises of liberal modernity and of the prevailing economic order as they found expression in some of his Easy Essays. We’ll attempt a merging of horizons, examining his ideas in the context of others in the Catholic tradition, from the Middle Ages to the post-conciliar pontiffs.
Course Details
We will meet online four Tuesdays at 6:30 pm Central Daylight Time: 5/5, 5/12, 5/19, 5/26.
Course is available live to all Patrons at the Worker-Scholar tier or above. Recordings will be available to all Patrons at the Salt of the Earth tier or above.