Dorothy's Place

Guest host Joe Waters (co-founder and CEO of Capita) joins Elias for a conversation with James R. Price, co-author with Kenneth R. Melchin of a new biography of the founder of the Peace Corps and head of Lyndon Johnson's War of Poverty in the 1960s. The focus is on the way Shriver (1915-2011) brought an instinctive spirituality to public service while avoiding sectarianism of any kind. Price is the executive director of the Sargent Shriver Peace Institute. Copies are available here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/spiritualizing-politics-without-politicizing-religion-the-example-of-sargent-shriver-james-r-price/17522834.

Pete and I talk to D.L. Mayfield, author of Unruly Saint, Dorothy Day's Radical Vision and Its Challenge for Our Times. This new biography puts a special focus on Dorothy as a mother and on the Depression-era launch of the Catholic Worker newspaper. Mayfield captures the charmed chaos of Catholic Worker houses, along with the enormous suffering that surrounded them in these years. Mayfield recounts how a copy of Day's The Long Loneliness helped her find her way out of a scrupulous white evangelicalism toward a different kind of Christian witness. Copies of the book are available here: https://bookshop.org/p/books/unruly-saint-dorothy-day-s-radical-vision-and-its-challenge-for-our-times-d-l-mayfield/17308724

A conversation with our first creative writer on the podcast, Evanston-based Joshua Corey, a poet, novelist, translator and critic. We talk about his remarkable longform poem, Hannah and the Master (a kind of dreamscape reflection on the intertwined lives of Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Simone Weil and other figures) and his new novel, How Long Is Now. Josh's personal site is here: http://www.joshua-corey.com/. His wonderful substack column is here: https://joshuacorey.substack.com/.

For this conversation, we join Joe Waters (of Capita)to talk to Mario Primicerio, now president of the La Pira Foundation, about his long friendship with fellow Florentine mayor, the late Giorgio La Pira. La Pira is remembered as being a bridge builder, working with Catholics and Communists in his beautiful Italian city in the late 1950s and 1960s. La Pira was also a friend of Thomas Merton and undertook a controversial mission to Hanoi to meet with Ho Chi Minh at the height of the Vietnam War. The occasion for our conversation is Solidarity Hall's forthcoming release of a biography of La Pira, The Power of Hope. (Ordering info on the Solidarity Hall website: https://solidarityhall.org/.)

Pete and I talk to Mike Budde about his new book, Foolishness to Gentiles, a collection of powerful essays asking how Christians can justify killing so many other Christians (Ukraine as only the latest instance), whether Dorothy Day is best understood as an anarchist, and how the Church could become an authentic counter-culture.

Pete describes himself as a capital P pragmatist (and a small D democrat) and offers us his take on this school of thought. In this chat we take a quick tour starting (naturally) with William James before getting to two of Pete's former teachers, both pragmatists: Cornel West and Roberto Mangabeira Unger (the guy in the headshot). Let's hear it for "democratic experimentalism"!

A conversation about Solidarity Hall's new translation of the Reflections of Fr. Josemaria Arizmendi, the founder of the Mondragon cooperatives. Elias and Pete talk about the nature of Arizmendi's social vision, the power of cooperative culture, and the workplace as a center of social transformation. To download a free PDF of the new translation, go here: https://solidarityhall.org/in_action/arizmendi-reflections-translation/.

We talk with Pete about his law school graduation address that went crazy viral and led to his new book about the nature of "long-haul" commitment. And about remarkable people with remarkable accomplishments who show us how to make those choices to stick with a vision.

Pete and I talk with Bob Elder about his new biography of the infamous John C. Calhoun, the spiritual founder of the Southern Confederacy and its economic foundation in slavery. We explore the range of Calhoun's ideas and why some of them--such as his views on secession--are not (like Calhoun himself) dead and buried but still alive in numerous places today.

Pete and I talk to Israeli-born Canadian author and activist Daphna Levit about her new book of essays recovering the wide spectrum of dissenting Jewish ideas about Zionism. Beginning with founding figures like Theodor Herzl and Ahad Ha'am, she highlights voices and views of Albert Einstein, Martin Buber, Noam Chomsky, and Hannah Arendt, among several contemporary writers.

A well-known blogger and speaker in Catholic media, Shea is a former evangelical whose conversion came to include a gradually deepening engagement with Catholic social teachings and their implications. Perhaps strangely to non-Catholics, the latter effort, along with Shea's appreciation of Pope Francis, have earned him the ire of many of America's ideologically conservative Catholics. We discuss Mark's new book, The Church's Best-Kept Secret (New City Press).

This country's 3 million Black Catholics in the U.S. recently got the news that Archbishop Wilton Gregory (Washington DC) has become the first African American cardinal. Why then have the U.S. bishops not publicly acknowledged the Black Lives Matters movement? We talk to Black Catholic seminarian and musician Nate Tinner-Williams about this question and his move from evangelical Christianity to Roman Catholicism and how it led him to a discovery of the roots of Black Catholicism in the U.S.

Pete's back and he joins Elias in interviewing Fred Dewey, author of The School of Public Life and a political/cultural activist. In the aftermath of the Rodney King riots, Fred helped lead a decade-long effort to establish neighborhood councils, now about one hundred, for the City of Los Angeles. Until 2010, he was director of Beyond Baroque, a poetry and cultural center in Venice CA, where projects included bringing segregated neighborhoods into dialogue through poetry. Over the last decade, Dewey has conducted free, public working groups in California and across Europe, at community centers, squats, schools, art spaces, and other sites, using the writings of Hannah Arendt. His Portable Polis, in 2017, met at ten sites across Berlin with Arendt texts on the purposes of each. He is based in LA and Brussels.

Why has the literature of ancient Greece always cast such a spell over modern readers? I dust off my own rusty skills in Greek with Dan Walden, a member of the classics department at the University of Michigan, as we discuss the Iliad, Sappho's poetry, and Plato’s Symposium—and why we share an enthusiasm for them in the original Greek. Along the way, we somehow manage to talk about St. Gregory of Nyssa, Tom Stoppard’s play, The Invention of Love, Bernard of Clairvaux, and the musical “Hedwig and the Angry Inch”.

A conversation about Cadwell's debut novel, The Lesson, a post-colonial vision of an alien invasion of the U.S. Virgin Islands (in a blue-white seashell-shaped craft) with a series of wonderfully bizarre twists. We also talk about growing up in the islands, the importance of creating a culture of cooperatives and cooperation, and a future fiction project.

The subtitle of the latest book from the wonderfully literate Scott Beauchamp is "Reunderstanding My Military Experience as a Critique of Modern Culture." In this conversation, Scott and I talk about boredom, ritual, community, honor, and the symbolism of cigarettes. Other topics are the war poetry of David Jones, the philosophy of Byung-Chul Han, and his new book about dead malls and the sublime.

A conversation about Andres' friendship with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, his experiences as part of her winning 2018 campaign, the Green New Deal initiative, and (with Pete's help) how to deconstruct "The Lion King."

Chicago not only has a new mayor but new politics, including grassroots initiatives such as the Kola Nut Collaborative, a hybrid of timebanking and community organizing. Pete and I get a read on all these things from Mike Strode, the founder of the KNC, about his path to the cooperative movement and four of his creative inspirations: Steve Biko, Ralph Ellison, Hoyt Fuller, and Hubert Harrison.

Pete and I talk to Eric Miller of Geneva College about why Christopher Lasch still matters and what we saw at the recent Front Porch Republic conference featuring Wendell Berry.

The election of Donald Trump in 2016 brought new readers to Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism (published in 1951). Pete and I talk to Samantha Hill, assistant director of Bard College's Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities, about the insights Arendt's thought offers us today.

Amidst a global culture war between the forces of neoliberal atomization and incorrigible fundamentalists, Adam Webb is proposing the creation of a deep cosmopolis, a global alliance of tradition-minded defenders of the poor. His own international background (UK, Spain, Peru, China)gives Webb fascinating insights into how the local and the global might combine forces.

A senior editor with Current Affairs, Brianna Rennix's day job is as an asylum attorney stationed just north of Laredo/Nuevo Laredo. We talk about her recent columns ("This Week in Terrible Immigration News") on topics such as what it's like to interview women with children fleeing violence and hoping the Trump administration will not succeed in separating them from their children.

Back on the air, Pete and Elias talk to the founder of Big Car (Indianapolis), Jim Walker, about his group's amazing track record using social practice art in Rust Belt placemaking and (even better) in "placekeeping." Also discussed: ideas of mercy in Fr. James Keenan and Isaac Bashevis Singer. (Sorry about the occasional noise!)

A co-founder of Solidarity Hall, Mark is a fellow "radical Catholic" and social entrepreneur. In this July 4 conversation, we talk about the sometimes painful process of revising our wrong-headed notions of Cold War history, along with thoughts on Rene Girard, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Dorothy Day.

What makes a town strong--financially and otherwise? Pete and Elias talk with Bo Wright about the mission and impact of the Strong Towns movement, along with a review of the documentary Human Flow and some thoughts on Rabbi A.J. Heschel's ideas of the sabbath.

Pete talks about his newly-published critique of the state of the legal profession (Bicentennial Crisis), aimed partly at his own Harvard Law School's practices. We also take up public service anthropology, explain what a stroad is, and ponder the Right to the City.

What if ordinary citizens stopped thinking of themselves as mere consumers and began acting as co-creators of their communities? Pete and I interview Karol Soltan, one of the founders of the Civic Studies movement, along with some talk about the Boston-based anti-eviction group called Urban Life/Vida Urbana and Jeremy Beer's book on how localized charity became placeless Big Philanthropy.

Pete and I interview Matt Bruenig, founder of the People's Policy Project, a think tank which hopes to avoid corporate capture by using crowd-funding for support. We gab about stuff like universal basic income, social wealth funds, and why libertarianism seems cool when you're in high school. Pete and I also talk about James Keenan's Moral Wisdom and the L.A. Kitchen project.

An oral historian in the tradition of Studs Terkel, Rosalie Riegle has written books on the history of the Catholic Worker movement, the non-violence movement and women's history. Before our interview with Rosalie (starting 13:15 mark), Pete and I talk about the organizational lessons of the AA movement and Douglas Rushkoff's terrific book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus.

We talk about a wonderful essay collection by localist Bill Kaufmann called Look Homeward, America and the neighborhood microfunding project called Detroit Soup before talking to Nathan Schneider about his days caught up in the middle of the Occupy encampment in NYC, platform cooperativism, and what radical Catholicism has to do with all this.

A quick chat about the most successful world-changing non-violent movement in modern history. Talk about your solidarity.

We chat with Liz Bruenig about the religious left, the "dirtbag" left, St. Augustine, the "nones", the trouble with meritocracy, Gar Alperovitz's Next System, and a great new book called Ours to Hack and to Own.

Our debut effort, talking with Matthew Loftus (of the Doctors Without Boredom blog) about from everything from healthcare in East Africa to Japanese social coops to a book on how this country's old system of federated organizations used to work.