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Love Is the Measure: A Biography of Dorothy Day
Love Is the Measure offers a richly illustrated biography of Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement and one of the most extraordinary and prophetic voices in the American Catholic church. Jim Forest, who worked with Day in the 1960s, provides a compelling portrait of her heroic efforts to live out the radical message of the gospel for our times.
A journalist and radical social reformer in her youth, at home in the bohemian Greenwich Village of the 1920s, Day surprised her friends with the decision in 1927 to enter the Catholic church. Her conversion, prompted by the birth out of wedlock of her daughter Tamar, left her searching for some way to reconcile her faith with her commitment to the cause of the poor and social justice.
The answer followed her meeting with the French peasant-philosopher Peter Maurin, who inspired her to start The Catholic Worker, both a newspaper and eventually a movement. Enunciating a radical social vision rooted in the gospel, Day and those who joined her devoted themselves to the Works of Mercy while struggling to create a new society "where it is easier to be good."
An ardent pacifist, Dorothy Day challenged consciences within the church and society with her total opposition to war and her commitment to voluntary poverty. Forest chronicles her frequent arrests in the cause of peace, while stressing throughout the unique spiritual vision that underlies her dramatic witness.
A journalist and radical social reformer in her youth, at home in the bohemian Greenwich Village of the 1920s, Day surprised her friends with the decision in 1927 to enter the Catholic church. Her conversion, prompted by the birth out of wedlock of her daughter Tamar, left her searching for some way to reconcile her faith with her commitment to the cause of the poor and social justice.
The answer followed her meeting with the French peasant-philosopher Peter Maurin, who inspired her to start The Catholic Worker, both a newspaper and eventually a movement. Enunciating a radical social vision rooted in the gospel, Day and those who joined her devoted themselves to the Works of Mercy while struggling to create a new society "where it is easier to be good."
An ardent pacifist, Dorothy Day challenged consciences within the church and society with her total opposition to war and her commitment to voluntary poverty. Forest chronicles her frequent arrests in the cause of peace, while stressing throughout the unique spiritual vision that underlies her dramatic witness.
166 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1986
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About the author
Jim Forest
52 books32 followersJim Forest is a writer, Orthodox Christian lay theologian, educator, and peace activist. As a young man, Jim served in the U.S. Navy, working with a meteorology unit at the U.S. Weather Bureau headquarters near Washington, D.C. It was during this period that he became a Catholic. After leaving the Navy, Jim joined the staff of the Catholic Worker community in Manhattan, working close with the founder, Dorothy Day, and for a time serving as managing editor of the journal she edited, The Catholic Worker.
In 1964, while working as a journalist for The Staten Island Advance, in his spare time he co-founded the Catholic Peace Fellowship, working closely with Tom Cornell. This became a full-time job for both of them in 1965, a time that coincided with deepening U.S. military engagement in Vietnam. The main focus of their work was counseling conscientious objectors.
In 1968, while Jim working as Vietnam Program Coordinator of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Jim and thirteen others, mainly Catholic clergy, broke into nine Milwaukee draft boards, removing and burning some of the files in a nearby park while holding a prayer service. Most members of the "Milwaukee Fourteen" served thirteen months in prison for their action.
In the late sixties and mid-seventies, Jim also worked with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, first as Vietnam Program coordinator and later as editor of Fellowship magazine. From 1977 through 1988, he was Secretary General of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, work which brought him to the Netherlands. He received the Peacemaker Award from Notre Dame University's Institute for International Peace Studies and the St. Marcellus Award from the Catholic Peace Fellowship.
In 1988, Forest was received into the Orthodox Church. Since 1989, he has been international secretary of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship as well as editor of its quarterly journal, In Communion. Jim had a long-term friendship with Thomas Merton, who dedicated a book to him, Faith and Violence. Jim also accompanied the famed Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. He and his wife Nancy, a translator and writer, live in Alkmaar, The Netherlands.
In 1964, while working as a journalist for The Staten Island Advance, in his spare time he co-founded the Catholic Peace Fellowship, working closely with Tom Cornell. This became a full-time job for both of them in 1965, a time that coincided with deepening U.S. military engagement in Vietnam. The main focus of their work was counseling conscientious objectors.
In 1968, while Jim working as Vietnam Program Coordinator of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, Jim and thirteen others, mainly Catholic clergy, broke into nine Milwaukee draft boards, removing and burning some of the files in a nearby park while holding a prayer service. Most members of the "Milwaukee Fourteen" served thirteen months in prison for their action.
In the late sixties and mid-seventies, Jim also worked with the Fellowship of Reconciliation, first as Vietnam Program coordinator and later as editor of Fellowship magazine. From 1977 through 1988, he was Secretary General of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation, work which brought him to the Netherlands. He received the Peacemaker Award from Notre Dame University's Institute for International Peace Studies and the St. Marcellus Award from the Catholic Peace Fellowship.
In 1988, Forest was received into the Orthodox Church. Since 1989, he has been international secretary of the Orthodox Peace Fellowship as well as editor of its quarterly journal, In Communion. Jim had a long-term friendship with Thomas Merton, who dedicated a book to him, Faith and Violence. Jim also accompanied the famed Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh. He and his wife Nancy, a translator and writer, live in Alkmaar, The Netherlands.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
April 29, 2010
On 13 May 1963 I opened my post, and there was a thin tabloid newspaper called the Catholic Worker. That evening I read it all, and the following day wrote to the editor, one Dorothy Day, and sent off a subscription to it. It impressed me greatly as a publication produced by people who seemed to take the Christian faith seriously. It was clearly not a Sundays-only hobby for them, but something for every day and every hour.
I was then a student at the University of Natal, and it had been sent to me by Brother Roger, of the Anglican religious order, the Community of the Resurrection, who had recently returned to the mother house at Mirfield in England after serving in South Africa for several years. I had met Brother Roger four years previously, and had got to know him fairly well. He encouraged me to publish a series of tracts to try to stir up people in the church, and one of the tracts, which he himself wrote, can be read here, as well as more about him.
He sent me the Catholic Worker with a note saying that they were doing the kind of thing that we had been trying to with our tracts, only it seemed that they had succeeded in actually doing things that we were only talking about.
It had articles about poor and exploited workers in the USA. It had articles by and about radical bishops in South America, like Helder Camara of Brazil, who saw it as part of his ministry ot conscientizar the matters, a word that was explained in the Catholic Worker, and later Anglicissed as "conscientise".
One article described a young man, dressed like many youth gang members who was picked up by the New York police, who questioned him about the rather large crucifix he was wearing, and asked him why he was wearing it, and his reply was a long the lines of "I wear it because I kind of like identify with |Jesus." Back then there were no laws against the wearing and disoplaying of religious symbols in most Western countries, though many are now beginning to introduce such laws.
And behind the newspaper was a community that fed the hungry, and lived in community on farms and in the cities. Nowadays there is much talk of new monasticism or urban monasticism, but the people at the Catholic Worker were already doing it in the 1930s.
Eventually my subscription to the Catholic Worker and I did not renew it because I was moving around too much, but I always remembered it, and wished I could have met the editor Dorothy Day, who was also the inspiration of the whole movement.
It was finally Glenn Beck who prompted me to read Dorothy Day's biography. He provoked a response from Jim Forest, who wrote the biography, and I discovered a copy in our university library, and hastened to read it.
I've known Jim as a cyberfriend for some years. We've never met in the flesh, but we've corresponded for some time, and I read Jim's blog. He coordinates the Orthodox Peace Fellowship, and is webmaster of their web page In Communion. I wish I could get to know him better too. His biography of Dorothy Day helped me to join the dots, and see how her vision developed, and it still continues today.
Dorothy Day was born in 1897, and grew up in New York, San Francisco (where her family lost most of their possessions in the 1906 earthquake) and Chicago. Her father was a journalist, and she became one too, working for left-wing papers, and becoming a radical anarcho-pacifist.
She did not have much of a Christian background, though she had been sent to an Episcopalian Sunday School when she was younger, and had learnt something about prayer. Eventually her praying led her to the Roman Catholic Church, and she was baptised, and turned to producing a radical Christian newspaper. She was helped by Peter Maurin, whose more theoretical vision was for a simplification of life, and going back to the land, and he would have preferred the Catholic Worker to be filled with theoretical essays, rather than with actual news that was of interest to the working-class poor.
The Catholic Worker gave me a vision of a new monasticism and community living, but when we actually tried it, in Windhoek 1969-1971, it did not seem to work so well. So the Catholic Worker communities seemed to me to be a kind of unattainable ideal, until I read the biography, and found that they had similar difficulties to the ones we had.
It was somehow both disappointing and reassuring to learn that something I had looked on an idea and often dreamed of emulating turned out to have the same weaknesses as our own real-life attempts. It was the death of many a hippie commune that dreamed of a "back to the land" movement: the cows need to be milked twice a day, whether you are grooving on that or not.
Another thing that I found interesting was to read more about Dorothy Day's own faith. The Catholicism to which she was converted was pre-Vatican II, and in many ways she preferred older form s of devotion and prayer, yet she welcomed the increased concern with social justice after Vatican II, even though they were often compromises that did not go far enough.
That was something one could not learn from reading the Catholic Worker and confirmed a theory of mine -- that liberal theology often goes hand in hand with conservative politics and vice versa.
Dorothy Day believed in obeying bishops, even when she thought they made wrong decisions, and there were sometimes agonising discussions about what they would do if the Archbishop of New York banned the Catholic Worker, which at some points seemed a real possibility. Fortunately he never did, though he was strongly anti-communist, and did not really approve of Dorothy Day and other Catholic Worker people continuing to associate with communists and other radical leftists right through the McCarthy era. Her way of peace and non-violence and love of enemies was very different from that of Cardinal Spellman, who told American soldiers in Vietnam that they were fighting a war for civilisation.
Dorothy Day was also very much aware of the moral dilemma referred to by the Orthodox theologian Christos Yannaras in his book The Freedom of Morality Contemporary Greek Theologians No 3:
Another Orthodox theologian, Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos, Bishop of Nafpaktos, put it thus in his book Person in the Orthodox tradition:
Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement built their philosophy of communitarianism on the basis of this Christian anthropology, a view that is summed up in the Zulu proverb "umuntu ungumuntu ngabantu" (a person is a person because of people). As the web site of the Dorothy Day Center notes:
So I'm grateful to Jim Forest for writing this biography, which helped me to see Dorothy Day in her setting. Jim also tells me that he is planning a revised version, as new material has become available since he wrote this one. So there is more to look forward to. But don't wait for the new edition -- learn about this marvellous Christian woman now.
I was then a student at the University of Natal, and it had been sent to me by Brother Roger, of the Anglican religious order, the Community of the Resurrection, who had recently returned to the mother house at Mirfield in England after serving in South Africa for several years. I had met Brother Roger four years previously, and had got to know him fairly well. He encouraged me to publish a series of tracts to try to stir up people in the church, and one of the tracts, which he himself wrote, can be read here, as well as more about him.
He sent me the Catholic Worker with a note saying that they were doing the kind of thing that we had been trying to with our tracts, only it seemed that they had succeeded in actually doing things that we were only talking about.
It had articles about poor and exploited workers in the USA. It had articles by and about radical bishops in South America, like Helder Camara of Brazil, who saw it as part of his ministry ot conscientizar the matters, a word that was explained in the Catholic Worker, and later Anglicissed as "conscientise".
One article described a young man, dressed like many youth gang members who was picked up by the New York police, who questioned him about the rather large crucifix he was wearing, and asked him why he was wearing it, and his reply was a long the lines of "I wear it because I kind of like identify with |Jesus." Back then there were no laws against the wearing and disoplaying of religious symbols in most Western countries, though many are now beginning to introduce such laws.
And behind the newspaper was a community that fed the hungry, and lived in community on farms and in the cities. Nowadays there is much talk of new monasticism or urban monasticism, but the people at the Catholic Worker were already doing it in the 1930s.
Eventually my subscription to the Catholic Worker and I did not renew it because I was moving around too much, but I always remembered it, and wished I could have met the editor Dorothy Day, who was also the inspiration of the whole movement.
It was finally Glenn Beck who prompted me to read Dorothy Day's biography. He provoked a response from Jim Forest, who wrote the biography, and I discovered a copy in our university library, and hastened to read it.
I've known Jim as a cyberfriend for some years. We've never met in the flesh, but we've corresponded for some time, and I read Jim's blog. He coordinates the Orthodox Peace Fellowship, and is webmaster of their web page In Communion. I wish I could get to know him better too. His biography of Dorothy Day helped me to join the dots, and see how her vision developed, and it still continues today.
Dorothy Day was born in 1897, and grew up in New York, San Francisco (where her family lost most of their possessions in the 1906 earthquake) and Chicago. Her father was a journalist, and she became one too, working for left-wing papers, and becoming a radical anarcho-pacifist.
She did not have much of a Christian background, though she had been sent to an Episcopalian Sunday School when she was younger, and had learnt something about prayer. Eventually her praying led her to the Roman Catholic Church, and she was baptised, and turned to producing a radical Christian newspaper. She was helped by Peter Maurin, whose more theoretical vision was for a simplification of life, and going back to the land, and he would have preferred the Catholic Worker to be filled with theoretical essays, rather than with actual news that was of interest to the working-class poor.
The Catholic Worker gave me a vision of a new monasticism and community living, but when we actually tried it, in Windhoek 1969-1971, it did not seem to work so well. So the Catholic Worker communities seemed to me to be a kind of unattainable ideal, until I read the biography, and found that they had similar difficulties to the ones we had.
Community life at Mary Farm, as it was named, proved often difficult and sometimes grim, "Eat what you raise and raise what you eat," said Peter Maurin, who came to live at Mary Farm. Unfortunately there were always more people interested in eating food than in raising it, who preferred a discussion of theology or politics to care of the fields or repair of a hinge (p. 68).
It was somehow both disappointing and reassuring to learn that something I had looked on an idea and often dreamed of emulating turned out to have the same weaknesses as our own real-life attempts. It was the death of many a hippie commune that dreamed of a "back to the land" movement: the cows need to be milked twice a day, whether you are grooving on that or not.
Another thing that I found interesting was to read more about Dorothy Day's own faith. The Catholicism to which she was converted was pre-Vatican II, and in many ways she preferred older form s of devotion and prayer, yet she welcomed the increased concern with social justice after Vatican II, even though they were often compromises that did not go far enough.
That was something one could not learn from reading the Catholic Worker and confirmed a theory of mine -- that liberal theology often goes hand in hand with conservative politics and vice versa.
Dorothy Day believed in obeying bishops, even when she thought they made wrong decisions, and there were sometimes agonising discussions about what they would do if the Archbishop of New York banned the Catholic Worker, which at some points seemed a real possibility. Fortunately he never did, though he was strongly anti-communist, and did not really approve of Dorothy Day and other Catholic Worker people continuing to associate with communists and other radical leftists right through the McCarthy era. Her way of peace and non-violence and love of enemies was very different from that of Cardinal Spellman, who told American soldiers in Vietnam that they were fighting a war for civilisation.
Dorothy Day was also very much aware of the moral dilemma referred to by the Orthodox theologian Christos Yannaras in his book The Freedom of Morality Contemporary Greek Theologians No 3:
Going by the example of America and the pietistic basis of the 'gospel of wealth' that took shape there, one might venture to make a further assertion. The whole of mankind lives today in the trap of a lethal threat created by the polarization of two provenly immoral moralistic systems, and the constant expectation of a confrontation between them in war, perhaps nuclear war. On the one side is the pietistic individualism of the capitalist camp, and on the other the moralistic collectivism of the marxist dreams of 'universal happiness.' At least the latter refuses to cloak its aims under the forged title of Christian, while the name of Christianity continues to be blackened in the sloganizing of even the foulest dictatorships which support the workings of the capitalist system, upholding the pietistic ideal of individual 'merit'.
Another Orthodox theologian, Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos, Bishop of Nafpaktos, put it thus in his book Person in the Orthodox tradition:
Two modes of life can be seen nowadays, 'individualism', in which the individual holds a central position, and in this case there is no real communion, and 'collectivism', in which man becomes a part of a mass and loses his freedom. In the first mode, individualism, the person is abolished in the name of freedom. In the second, collectivism, man becomes part of a mass in the name of the unity of society, and so the freedom of the person is abolished... St Gregory the Theologian makes some excellent observations on the subject. Man, being in the image and likeness of God, can neither be considered a numeric unit nor can become part of a mass. Thus, in the Orthodox Church, as preserved in parishes and monasteries that securely move within the Orthodox framework, both the person and communion among men is vouchsafed, in which case man can neither be enclosed in a barren individualism nor be transformed into part of a mass.
Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker movement built their philosophy of communitarianism on the basis of this Christian anthropology, a view that is summed up in the Zulu proverb "umuntu ungumuntu ngabantu" (a person is a person because of people). As the web site of the Dorothy Day Center notes:
The Nazis, the Fascists, and the Bolshevists are Totalitarians. The Catholic Worker is Communitarian. The principles of Communitarianism are expounded every month in the French magazine Esprit (The Spirit).
So I'm grateful to Jim Forest for writing this biography, which helped me to see Dorothy Day in her setting. Jim also tells me that he is planning a revised version, as new material has become available since he wrote this one. So there is more to look forward to. But don't wait for the new edition -- learn about this marvellous Christian woman now.
July 4, 2024
I just love Dorothy Day so much 😭🫶🏼
July 17, 2015
"in any event, [Dorothy] set an example which continues to influence many people. One can say she helped bring about a reformation that centered on the Catholic Church but reached far beyond it. It is not a reformation emphasizing theological doctrine but one rooted in the sacredness of life, the truth that we are each made in the image and likeness of God, and the real presence of Christ in the poor. She gave an example of hospitality and mercy as a way of life...To put it as simply as possible, she gave an example of active love. "Love is the measure," she so often said, "by which we will be judged." (from p.156)
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March 29, 2018This book was an excellent introduction to the life and work of Dorothy Day. Often my favourite parts were those where she, herself, was quoted. She was a journalist all her life so I’d love to read her The Long Loneliness (an autobiography). Her example as a Christian committed to seeing and serving Jesus in the poor is inspiring and humbling.
December 23, 2011
I read this in my Theology class, and I really enjoyed learning about Dorothy Day's life. She started the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933, opened houses of hospitality, and devoted her time to helping others and living a life of voluntary poverty.
March 25, 2010
This is a good book about a remarkable woman. I have heard about Dorothy Day (1897-1980) for decades, and I am happy that I finally know more about her and her remarkable work for social justice.
February 27, 2011
Not many I give 5 stars to but this book is a god read from start to finish. Short but well worth reading.
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November 7, 2019Superb!
April 10, 2021
A thoughtful biography of a radical Catholic woman who started the Catholic Worker newspaper. She lived her beliefs and left a mark on the world.
April 3, 2025
I cannot get enough of the life of Dorothy Day and Jim Forest brings a great contribution to the collection of works on her life.
October 2, 2025
Dorothy Day’s love for the poor and her care for those less fortunate are clearly demonstrated in this fine work. A must read for all who want to know more about what it’s like to help the needy.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews