Dorothy Day for Armchair Theologians

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Dorothy Day holding up a prison dress. Photo courtesy of Jim Forest through a Creative Commons license.

The Armchair Theologians series from Westminster John Knox is, as one expects by the title, designed to be an accessible and entertaining approach to the biographies of some of the most significant theologians. The authors for these volumes are always fans of the biographical subject. Therefore, there tends to be a bias toward the views of the subject, with a very minimal critique offered.

Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty’s recent contribution to the series on the socialist Catholic, Dorothy Day fits into the series well. On the whole, Hinson-Hasty celebrates the life and work of Day, only stopping to critique Day in those places where she was not sufficiently feminist. Therefore, Day’s negative view of abortion, willingness to get married, and traditional views on sexual orientation are noted as blemishes on her record and excused based on chronologically inferior cultural influence.

Setting aside the somewhat hagiographic aspects of this work, and the series in general, which are native to this approach, this volume in particular is a very helpful means of getting introduced to the lives of significant theologians. In fact, the whole series by Westminster John Knox is enjoyable because the authors like the subject. This makes the prose more lively in many cases.

At just about 200 pages, Hinson-Hasty provides an overview of Day’s life and work that covers the major epochs in her life, the main thrust of her work, and helps to place Day in her cultural context. Additionally, the author shows how Day’s ideas have been appropriated and applied to contemporary social justice movements. This makes the book a useful introduction into the topic.

Before reading Hinson-Hasty’s book, Dorothy Day was relatively unknown to me. In fact, this is one of the reasons I requested this book for review. I have read excerpts of her writing in my time as a seminary student, but had learned very little about her. 

Dorothy's last meeting with Mother Teresa. This occurred in Dorothy's room at Maryhouse in Manhattan. Eileen Egan is on the left. The photo was taken in 1979, the year before Dorothy's death, by Bill Barrett. (Marquette University Archives) Photo Credit to Jim Forest through a Creative Commons license.

Dorothy Day was not a professional theologian or ethicist. In fact, she had no academic credentials to speak of. She was, however, a writer and a social activist who was key in the labor movement in a particular era of American history. Day’s life demonstrates that all the degrees in the world do not make one influential, and that influence can be gained by continual, faithful witness.

Day was nothing if not a legitimate practitioner of her views. She was a socialist, and so she lived in community. She was a strong advocate of a “peace ethic” and so she went to a great distance not to have hierarchical relationships, or even rules, in the open communities in which she lived.

Dorothy Day was influential for some of the liberation theologians. Her writing in the Catholic Worker, as pro-socialist newspaper, helped to shape the thinking of many of the Latin American liberation theologians such as Gustavo Gutierrez. Much like Gutierrez would later do, Day lived in poverty in the slums rather than doing her philanthropic theologizing from a distant suburban neighborhood.

It is for her integrity that Day deserves the most praise. She authentically lived in community with people from any and every social background. She sought to do her work for the poor from among the poor. This helped keep her faithful to her message, and lends credibility to her writing. Hinson-Hasty helped me gain a new appreciation for Dorothy Day through her presentation of Day’s life in this biography.

In the end, while I do not agree with the author’s theological positions, this is a helpful book. In fact, all of the Armchair Theologians are worthwhile reads when you are trying to get a quick overview of the life of a significant Christian thinker.

I commend this book and the entire series to readers because, in a world awash with information, such brief biographies provide engaging and informative introductions. While not suitable for academic research, they are beneficial for personal edification.

Dorothy Day for Armchair Theologians

$14.56

By Elizabeth Hinson-Hasty

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Note: A gratis copy of this book was provided to me by the publisher with no expectation of a positive review. All opinions expressed are my own.

David Livingstone, Abolitionist

“To all our subjects who may see this and also to others, may God save you, know that we have prohibited the transport of slaves by sea in all our harbours and have closed the markets which are for sale of slaves through all our dominions. Whoever therefore shall ship a raw slave after this date will render himself liable to punishment and this he will bring upon himself. Be this known.” – From a notice, posted on a customhouse in Zanzibar on June 5, 1873, about 1 month after David Livingstone’s death.

Every biography of David Livingstone picks up on a different aspect of his life. He’s hailed as a paragon of missionaries for abandoning the colonial model of a mission station to push to the interior of Africa. Unfortunately, by most ways missionaries are measured, he was not terribly successful, with few converts in his lifetime. He is sometimes celebrated as a scientist due to his medical discoveries, particularly his pioneering of the treatment of quinine for the prevention and treatment of malaria. Often he is known as a great explorer because of his expeditions into the heart of Africa to map the territory and to attempt to find the headwaters of the Nile.

Jay Milbrandt’s recent biography, The Daring Heart of David Livingstone: Exile, African Slavery, and the Publicity Stunt that Saved Millions highlights an element of Livingstone’s life that is often little publicized: Livingstone was passionate about ending the brutal slave trade in East Africa. In fact, the closing of the slave markets in Zanzibar, highlighted in the statement above, was one of the greatest accomplishments of his career, which unfortunately he did not live to see.

Reading of Livingstone’s life is heartbreaking. He failed at several major efforts. He won the hearts of the people of Britain and America due to his discoveries and his missionary accounts. But then he lost the crowd’s applause due to his public failures, which were driven in part by his personal weaknesses. He was, at times, a poor leader. By any reasonable metric he was a terrible father whose children barely knew him, if at all. Still, his wife had every reason to despise him and yet she loved him. I have read several biographies of Livingstone before. I have at times wondered why he is such a celebrated hero. Milbrandt has done a service by highlighting Livingstone’s greatest achievement.

This is a dark book at many points. In order to illustrate the importance of Livingstone’s fight against the slave trade, Milbrandt reveals some of the gruesome details of the conditions in East Africa during Livingstone's time.

For example, in order to destabilize conditions in an otherwise generally peaceful region of Africa, slave traders sent parties in to murder as much as to capture slaves. Villages would be wiped out with a few survivors taken captive, tied together, and sent on a death march toward the coast where they would be sold to the highest bidder. Disease, starvation, and exhaustion took the lives of many of the captives before they reached their destinations.

Livingstone records something more horrifying than the direct deaths due to the brutal slave raids:

“The strangest disease I have seen in this country seems really to be the broken-heartedness, and it attacks free men who have been captured and made slaves. . . . They ascribed their only pain to the heart, and placed the hand correctly on the spot, though many think that the organ stands high up under the breast bone. Some slavers expressed surprise to me that [their slaves] should die, seeing they had plenty to eat and no work . . . it seems to be really broken-hearts of which they die.”

Their families slaughtered, the captives in the slave camps died because their freedom was gone. They ceased to live because they had nothing left to live for. Slavery was a misery worse than the physical ailments that beset them. The blackness of the evil of slavery in that context must be understood if the value of Livingstone’s life work is to be recognized.

One of the more intriguing twists in Livingstone’s fight for abolition is that it was a publicity stunt that had the most impact in stopping the brutal slave trade. Livingstone had been reported dead by some of the natives who had accompanied his expedition to find the headwaters of the Nile. In order to scoop the British papers, the New York Herald sent Henry Morton Stanley to go find the wayward explorer.

Against all odds, Stanley was successful. After a series of interviews over a period of four months, Stanley left Livingstone, unable to convince the explorer to return to civilization. Livingstone did, however, send journals and letters with Stanley, which were influential in spurring political action in Britain to lean on the African nations to end their trade in slaves.

Contributing to the building momentum toward abolition was the dynamic between Britain, who had ended slavery in the early 19th century, and the United States, who had only ended their barbaric human trafficking after a bloody and divisive Civil War. Stanley’s efforts, funded by a US paper helped to shame the British into a more forward action against the slave trade.

Stanley’s encounter also provides a less biased picture of the man who was David Livingstone. Though Stanley was not particularly religious, he wrote this about Livingstone:

“His religion is not of the theoretical kind, but it is a constant, earnest, sincere practice. It is neither demonstrative nor loud, but manifests itself in a quiet, practical way, and is always at work . . . In him, religion exhibits its loveliest features; it governs his conduct not only toward his servants. . . . Religion has tamed him, and made him a Christian gentleman.”

Stanley’s admiration for the man, despite his failings, helps explain why Livingstone’s legacy is as great as it is. It also helps to explain why his wife, Mary, risked disease and death to be with her husband, though he had frequently left her behind for years at a time during his explorations. It also explains why so many of the Africans loved the man so dearly.

As Milbrandt aptly writes, “Livingstone’s story is one of failure and falling from grace. But it is also a story of relentless commitment that brings redemption we may never know, and a story greater than we could ever image. This is David Livingstone’s legacy.”

I am thankful to Jay Milbrandt for investing his time to write this biography. He has done a good thing to draw out the victory against slavery that came through Livingstone’s work. Milbrandt illustrates the reality that many great men and women had serious failings, and that despite these failings their memories should not be cast aside forever, nor should their weaknesses be ignored.

Though Livingstone did not accomplish all he set out to do, a worthy tribute was once paid to him in a speech made by an old African man that had once met the explorer:

“A white man who treated black men as his brothers, and whose memory would always be cherished all along the Rovuma Valley after we were all dead and gone. A short man with a bushy moustache, and a keen piercing eye, whose words were always gentle, and whose manners were always kind, whom as a leader it was a privilege to follow, and who knew the way to the hearts of all men.” 

The Daring Heart of David Livingstone: Exile, African Slavery, and the Publicity Stunt That Saved Millions

$18.62

By Jay Milbrandt

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received this book free from the publisher through the BookLook Bloggers book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”