Podcast: Dorothy Day and the call to live the Sermon on the Mount

On this week's episode of "The Nonviolent Jesus Podcast," I reflect on the life and witness of Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker. 

Last month, at the Catholic Institute for Nonviolence international conference in Rome, I suggested in my speech that it's time we all took up Dorothy Day's example and committed ourselves full time to Jesus' Sermon on the Mount. Just after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, as the U.S. entered World War II, she published a bold headline saying, "Our Manifesto Is the Sermon on the Mount!" Thousands left her movement overnight. That is the stand that we all need to take.

With that in mind, I'm offering a new podcast on the life and witness of Dorothy Day, to learn from her how we too can live as servants and disciples of the nonviolent Jesus and proclaim the coming of God's reign of peace, even in a bad time.

"Nonviolent resistance is the only sane solution," she wrote during the war. "We have to continue to make our voice heard until we are finally silenced — and even then, in jail or concentration camp, to express ourselves. … If there are not some who still hold this ideal, still speak in terms of the counsels of perfection, the ideal will be lost. I do not see why we must accept the inevitability of war. It was only in the last century that slavery was done away with here in this country, and I suppose that everybody thought it was inevitable, something to be accepted, before that time. If we are working towards peace, we must look with hope that in a future generation we will do away with war. You know with how great suffering and how great prayer we are trying to hold up these ideas." 

Listen to the full episode here.