2013/05/01 by Robert Atkins · 2 citations
Arts and Humanities · #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #French Historical and Cultural Studies #Personalism #Encyclical #Successor cardinal #Hospitality #Social reform #Classics #Sociology #Fatherland #Theology #Religious studies #Philosophy #History #Law #Political science #Politics
paper · doi:10.1080/1474225x.2013.780400
openalex publication_date 2013/05/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
The French thinkers who influenced the American social activist Dorothy Day through Peter Maurin are representative of French progressive thought connected with the 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum and its 1931 successor, Quadragesimo Anno. This article discusses the influence of Kropotkin, de Foucauld, Maritain and Mounier on Day. In France itself, this thought was often frustrated but Day provides an example of the implementation of Roman Catholic Personalism in the American setting. Day was both a popularising journalist and a tireless practitioner of the threefold platform deriving from Maurin's philosophy of Roundtable Discussion, Farming Communes and Houses of Hospitality. By the early 1950s, the tangential nature of Day's interest in the worker priest movement, when the question of its suppression had global prominence, shows that Maurin had been successful not in interesting her in his French influences for their own sake but in bequeathing to her a workable synthesis as a framework for her own efforts.