People of the Books

NOT LONG AFTER graduating college, I read everything I could find about various expressions of Christian community. Somewhere along the way, I stumbled upon the stories of Dorothy Day, Peter Maurin, and the other Catholic Workers who would follow in their footsteps. I remember being immediately captivated by the Catholic Worker vision for hospitality houses that were community hubs for both action—growing food, feeding the hungry, protesting American militarism—and learning—cultivating conversation and reflection on radical Christian faithfulness and the socioeconomic vision that defined the movement.

Although perhaps more widely admired for their activism and works of mercy, the Catholic Workers have long published a newspaper that is a catalyst for their social vision—fusing the stories of scripture, saints, and literature with the ubiquitous challenge to live faithfully in an age marked by greed and violence. In the words of Maurin, an essential part of their mission is to make “workers out of scholars and scholars out of workers.”

Day and Maurin, co-founders of the Catholic Worker movement, are remembered as visionaries, guided by an idealism that sought to embody not only the stories of Jesus and the ancient Hebrew prophets, but also those of the radical Christian saints—such as Francis or Teresa of Avila—and modern writers whose ideas energized them—such as Dostoevsky, Peter Kropotkin, and Simone Weil. The stories of St. Francis were, for Maurin, more than quaint bits of history. Rather, they were a guiding vision that daily compelled him to live out a life of holy poverty.

In Robert Coles’ celebrated biography Dorothy Day: A Radical Devotion, he devotes a chapter to exploring her idealism and where it came from. He observes that “[Dostoevsky] would not let her sleep. Tennyson stirred her to romantic anguish. Passages from the Bible’s words somehow stood out, as if meant for her.” Although idealism often carries the negative connotation of naïveté, we could alternately describe these virtues that Coles found in Day as her “social imagination”: the stories, ideas, and forces at work shaping reality behind and throughout her life. Day’s greatest hope was that she might be one who read Dostoevsky well. She also learned as much about forgiveness from the novels of Charles Dickens as she did from scripture. Ignazio Silone’s novel Bread and Wine helped her understand the nature of companionship, of being present to one another in sharing food together.

For Day and Maurin, the social imagination was the arena in which compelling stories guided them as they grappled with daily decisions about how to live transformatively in the world. As we seek to faithfully incarnate God’s reign in the 21st century, we also need a healthy social imagination, cultivated through attentive habits of reading that are engaged with our places and the world. Our local church communities are essential spaces in which we are called to nurture this social imagination that interweaves learning and action.

Living out a social vision

Throughout their history, Catholic Workers have emphasized that their socioeconomic vision is not just something to be talked about and worked for—they seek to embody their vision through communities of like-minded people in particular places. Maurin, quoting the Industrial Workers of the World, would say that Catholic Worker communities, whether urban houses of hospitality or rural farms, were intended “to create a new society within the shell of the old.” As frustrating as churches can be, too often bogged down with bureaucracy and bad theology, it is in community that Christ’s followers are called to live together in a way that gives form to the person and vision of Jesus.

My personal ideas for how the world should function are of little value until they are shared with others and inform the ways in which I interact with actual human communities. As visionary as both Maurin and Day were, their hopes for society were not held in isolation. Rather, their ideas were deeply shaped not only by one another, but also by the larger Catholic Worker community. Our congregations could stand to learn a great deal from the Catholic Workers in terms of being attentive both to cultivating a robust Christian social vision (and the biblical interpretation and theology that undergirds it) and to the ways in which we work to exemplify that social vision in our particular places.

Reading is essential to cultivating such a Christian social vision, as it guides our quest to understand our identity.

In the Christian tradition, reading scripture is the primary way in which we discern our identity. Day’s contributions to the Catholic Worker movement, for instance, were profoundly shaped by her rigorous commitment to daily Bible reading, and the ways that this practice seasoned her thinking. Scripture, however, cannot and should not be read in a vacuum. Works of biblical scholarship and theology help us understand what the texts meant to their original readers and how they have been interpreted by communities of Christ’s followers in other times and places. Our calling is not only to understand scripture but also, through our understanding of it, adopt a way of life that reflects the fullness of Christ to our neighbors.

A confluence of genres

Reading aids in the work of embodiment by clarifying our understanding of who we are, of the tradition to which we belong, and of the ends toward which we hope to move. The work of embodiment also requires that we have a solid understanding of the time and place within which we exist. Reading fiction, poetry, philosophy, social theory, and many other sorts of books can contribute meaningfully to this work.

Fiction, for instance, can increase our capacity for empathy, as we are allowed to share in the thoughts and emotions of people who differ from ourselves. Reading poetry slows us down and challenges us to be attentive to minute details. Works of sociology, economics, and other social theory help to deepen our understanding of the times we live in and of how we might faithfully follow Jesus in our day.

A church acts well in the world when, like the Catholic Workers, our action flows from a deep sense of our identity and a rich imagination of what it looks like for us to be faithful as a community to the way of Jesus.

The more diversely we read, the richer our social imagination will be. But this does not necessarily mean that each person in our church must read as widely (and identically) as possible. The diversity of reading can be spread out across our community, each of us reading the sorts of books we are personally passionate about, with an eye toward the potential relevance of our personal reading to enrich our shared faithfulness. The social vision of the Catholic Workers, for instance, benefitted from the confluence of Day’s passion for reading fiction and Maurin’s deep knowledge of the historical tradition of radical Christian discipleship.

In order for our congregations to benefit from the personal reading of each member, we also need to cultivate habits of conversation. As books such as Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort (2008) and Sherry Turkle’s Reclaiming Conversation (2015) remind us, conversation is rapidly becoming a lost art in 21st century North America. One of the fundamental tenets of the social vision of Maurin was the necessity of round-table discussions, which helped clarify the thought of a community. Through conversation, we not only clarify the vision that we hope will guide our action, but we also make decisions about the shape that our life together will take, challenging each other to live faithfully to that collective vision.

Conversation is at the heart

For many Christians, church has been reduced to a commodity: a handful of services and programs that we regularly consume as part of our religious duty. In conversation, however, our experience of church cannot be relegated to passive consumption—we must be active participants, or the conversation will die off. Our congregations are in dire need of spaces in our life together in which we can relearn the art of conversation. Reading and discussing scripture together, perhaps in light of other books we are reading on our own, is one natural way for churches to ease themselves into the practice of conversation.

In my congregation, Englewood Christian Church, on the urban Near Eastside of Indianapolis, we have been privileged to do some important work in our neighborhood over the last two decades: early childhood education, affordable housing, hydroponic farming, economic development, and more. Yet what outsiders often miss are the years we have spent reading and talking together.

In the early 1990s, we stumbled into a regular practice of meeting every Sunday night for intentional conversation. In the course of this dialogue, we have wrestled with scripture, discussed books, and most importantly tried to weave our reading and our convictions into a deeper, shared vision of what it might mean for us to embody Jesus’ teachings together faithfully in this place. Although reading is central to our practice of conversation, our gathering is not a book club that people opt out if they are not interested in a particular reading. Rather, this conversation is at the very heart of our life together, and indeed it is the space in which we are ever discerning and clarifying what the unfolding shape of our congregation will be. Just as the Sunday morning service is a time set aside for us to practice worship, our Sunday evening conversation is a time we gather to practice being present and listening to one another, and learning to imagine how we will live into the scriptural story together.

Our Sunday night conversations have overflowed abundantly into a multitude of ongoing conversations that reach into all corners of our life together. For instance, reflecting on John McKnight’s book The Careless Society, especially its theologically rich postscript, has been immensely helpful in transforming our imagination about what it looks like to love our neighbors in ways that do not demean or dominate them.

With a deep desire to love our neighbors well, and having the vision and trust that are fruits of conversation, we have been able to do some significant things together.

At Englewood, our experience demonstrates that with healthy doses of attentiveness and effort, it is possible for a church to cultivate a social imagination together—one that guides and sustains the work of transformative action. Our practices of reading and discussion have significantly reshaped the life, work, and vision of the congregation, continuing to form us into a more faithful embodiment of Christian love in our neighborhood. We heartily recommend robust habits of reading and talking together, and are grateful to communities such as the Catholic Workers who have inspired and guided us.