Our Dorothy Days

In this Sunday's New York Times Book Review, Darcey Steinke reviews Mary Gordon's Circling My Mother: A Memoir, what seems like another really excellent book by a really excellent Catholic writer. In the review, Steinke, the daughter of a Lutheran minister, reminisces about the days when priests were not just respected, but revered. A time, frankly, when American Catholicism seemed to have something to offer to America. In literature, AC gave us Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy; in politics, the Kennedys; in Hollywood, the convert Gary Cooper; and in the world of service, reform, and activism, two more converts, Thomas Merton and Dorothy Day.

Today, sex scandals, outmoded approaches to birth control and abortion, and, says Steinke, a lack of writers with the religious imagination and literary command of Merton or O'Connor (except, perhaps, Gordon), have diminished AC. (And while I agree that AC has diminished, for my sake, and the sake of a few other Catholic writers I like, I hope she's wrong on the last point.)

Steinke is not alone these days in seeing something unique, and even inspiring, in the less-tarnished age of AC (I can't in good conscience, or good faith, talk of a golden age). And of all the figures she mentions in the Gordon review, Dorothy Day continues to define the religious impulse to serve. Lately, though, while progressive Catholic apologists (myself included) are faced with the task of shaping up the church from within and/or deciding what it might mean to call oneself a Catholic while opposing many of the Church's official positions (e.g., on birth control, abortion, women clergy, etc., etc.), Day is cropping up as an inspiration to the religious apologies of non-Catholics.

Like Day, who founded the Catholic Worker, both Sara Miles, a convert to the Episcopal church, and Eboo Patel, an American Muslim of Indian descent, have begun organizing people in the spirit of service; and like Day, in Take this Bread (Miles) and Acts of Faith (Patel), both have written elegantly about their work. While I've always loved Dorothy Day -- she's shaped my approach to religious writing more than perhaps anyone else -- temperamentally I'm not an organizer. Unlikely inheritors of the Catholic Worker, non-Catholics Miles and Patel are. And, in this, they share a faith.

Welcome

Welcome to The Faith Between Us dot-com! This will be our first, slightly longwinded, blog post. We hope you enjoy it.

Before we really begin, though, a little history...

Several years ago, when Peter’s wife, Amy, was pregnant with their son, Sam, and Scott was finishing divinity school, we met. We were both writing a lot for online magazines (esp. this one) and small literary journals. Scott was even publishing one. Liking what the other had to say (er, write), we began corresponding and soon became friends.

As new friends do, we talked about music and books and relationships, our families and our backgrounds. Peter had recently become a birder and was taking very slowly to Stephen Malkmus’s first solo release after Pavement broke up. Scott was working on a novel about poor children and, time and time again, failing with women.

Privately, though, Peter was spending afternoons searching for the perfect Jewish prayer book; Scott was teaching the Catholic catechism at his local church. Peter and Amy were beginning to celebrate Shabbat as a family; Scott’s obsession with religious discipline shaped his eating and his sex life and manifested itself in a facial tic. Nervous to be known as believers, we kept quiet. Neither of us said a word. At least not right away...

Slowly it happened, though. Growing more comfortable with each other and asking each other more questions, each of us decided to let things slip.

“What is it you love about birds, Peter?”
“They’re part of creation that fascinates me, blows me away!”

“What are you reading these days, Scott?”
“I can’t put down Dorothy Day’s Long Loneliness. It’s amazing.”

“Why did you go to divinity school, Scott?”
“Probably the same reason you did: to see what belief really means.”

“What was it like when your mother died, Peter?”
“As if God had torn the roof off!”

Finally:
“Do you believe in God?”
“Um, yes.”
“Yeah, me too. Sort of.”

Our book, The Faith Between Us (Bloomsbury, Nov.), is our “coming out” story. It shows how, through our friendship, we've come to have faith in God's creation, which to us means a faith in the world. Placed side by side, with essays alternating one after another, our individual stories are meant to interact, to carry on a conversation of faith like the ones we've had since that day we both, with trepidation, admitted to believing in God.

With the book, we hope to have captured some of the literary beauty and wonder of the religious language we love. The essays draw on entire lives of faith, from our first encounters with God to the ongoing struggles we still face together today, and explore our dealings with love, loss, drugs, sex, food, music—even our neuroses and neuralgias.

We've been telling each other these stories for years now. Our hope is that starting this blog, in appearing in public as faithful friends, we might begin to hear other stories – your stories – and, through our “comments” section, carry on more conversations about belief, disbelief, hope, doubt, and the longing to find the meaning of God.

We’ll use this blog to introduce themes we take up in the book; to talk about articles we read, people we meet, songs we hear, and events we attend; and to share our thoughts about what it might mean to believe.

In his “Foreword” to Faith, Freakonomics author Stephen J. Dubner asks:

“Where are all the sincere, wise, good-hearted people who live each day in quiet pursuit of answers (or perhaps questions) as to how we should live on earth, and to what measure that life should include some sort of God?”

Without taking ourselves too seriously, we hope that this blog can be one of the places where sincere, good-hearted people can gather. We hope you’ll join us.