God in Gotham by Jon Butler

Author:Jon Butler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

The criticisms—not unlike those leveled against Niebuhr, Tillich, Heschel, and Kaplan—reflected the power of Soloveitchik’s vision. Few would have bothered contesting Soloveitchik had he not been both creative and influential. No one else spoke so forcefully to and for American Jews who yearned for traditional religious community within the diversity and hustle of modern life.52

* * *

Dorothy Day stands out from her compatriots, and not merely because she was a woman. Among the individuals traced here, she and Maritain were the only lay figures. She also had the least formal religious training and the edgiest relationship with the religion she embraced. Finally, she was the most spiritually and politically radical. For decades, Day was the most famous Catholic woman in America and perhaps the most famous religious woman in America—or the most infamous, to her detractors.

Day strayed far from her early religious background. Born in Brooklyn in 1897 because it was the momentary locale of her father’s newspaper job, she read the Bible, stories of the saints, even the Puritan Jonathan Edwards. She was confirmed in a Chicago Episcopalian church as an adolescent. Her early interest in religion may have come in part in reaction to her parents’ indifference. It also is not hard to see how engagement with immovable truths might have salved the insecurities caused by her family’s frequent relocation. She attended the University of Illinois for two years, moved to New York City, read avidly, became a socialist, developed strong friendships with American Communists, engaged in several love affairs, became pregnant, had an abortion, married, divorced, and wrote a novel, The Eleventh Virgin. The book gained little attention, but a Hollywood film studio still optioned it, and the resulting funds enabled Day to purchase a Staten Island beach cabin. There, she began a new relationship with an antireligious biologist and anarchist, Forster Batterham.53

Day’s relationship with Batterham inadvertently led to her conversion to Catholicism. Concerned that her abortion had ended her capacity to have children, Day was startled to become pregnant in the summer of 1925. She was ecstatic, but Batterham was not. He was opposed to bringing more children into the world and pressed Day to have another abortion. His demand ran aground on Day’s deep desire to have the child, which was fortified by a renewed interest in religion, Catholicism specifically. She began attending Mass and, after refusing the abortion, named her baby Tamar Teresa, after St. Thérèse of Lisieux. She read William James’s Varieties of Religious Experience, the medieval devotional text The Imitation of Christ, and Dostoyevsky. At one point Day saw a nun on the street, “went up to her breathlessly and asked her how I could have my baby baptized.” The sympathetic nun met Day three times weekly for catechism lessons, and Tamar was baptized in July 1927. Batterham came and went through that summer and fall amidst escalating arguments about religion and Tamar’s baptism. Though she had loved him dearly, Day ended their relationship in December, and shortly thereafter received Catholic baptism herself.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.