Contributing to the continuing excavation of the religious lifeworld of Dorothy Day—“the most vital, fascinating, and influential individual within the background of yankee Catholicism”—The Bread of the powerful bargains compelling new perception into the historical past of the Catholic employee flow, together with the cross-pollination among American and Quebecois Catholicism and discourse approximately Christian antimodernism and radicalism.

The massive perseverance within the heroic Christian maximalism that turned the hallmark of the Catholic Worker’s personalism owes a good debt to the impression of Lacouturisme, mostly less than the stewardship of John Hugo, in addition to Peter Maurin and myriad different serious interventions in Day’s non secular improvement. Day made the retreat usually for a few thirty-five years and promoted it vigorously either in individual and publicly within the pages of The Catholic Worker.

Exploring the effect of the debatable North American revivalist flow at the non secular formation of Dorothy Day, writer Jack Lee Downey investigates the extremist intersection among Roman Catholic contemplative culture and sleek political radicalism. good grounded in an abundance of lesser-known fundamental assets, together with unpublished letters, retreat notes, privately released and long-out-of-print archival fabric, and the French-language papers of Fr. Lacouture, The Bread of the robust opens up a completely new enviornment of scholarship at the transnational lineages of yank Catholic social justice activism. Downey additionally unearths riveting new insights into the movement’s founder and namesake, Quebecois Jesuit Onesime Lacouture. Downey additionally frames a extra reciprocal depiction of Day and Hugo’s courting and effect, together with the significance of Day’s evangelical pacifism on Hugo, fairly in shaping his realizing of conscientious objection and Christian antiwar paintings, and the way Hugo’s ascetical theology lively Day’s inside lifestyles and spiritually sustained her apostolate.

A attention-grabbing research into the retreat circulation Day enjoyed so dearly, and which she claimed was once quintessential to her religious formation, The Bread of the robust explores the connection among contemplative theology, asceticism, and radical activism. greater than a examine of Lacouture, Hugo, and Day, this clean examine Dorothy Day and the complexities and demanding situations of her religious and social expression provides an outward exploration of the early- to mid–twentieth century dilemmas dealing with moment- and third-generation American Catholics.