Protestants into Dorothy Day

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I stumbled across a couple of Catholic stories at Duke University's Leadership Education website. Jason Byassee, a former editor at Christian Century magazine and now executive director at Leadership Education, interviews Notre Dame Assistant Professor Margaret Pfeil, who lives in a Catholic Worker house in South Bend.

"We try to welcome people as they are, without necessarily giving them a spiel about who Dorothy Day was. We try to live in a way that makes guests feel comfortable and welcomed," she told Byassee. "We want them to understand that we intend to be a house of hospitality (I’m sure we do this imperfectly, by the way). Hopefully after awhile people begin to feel comfortable and will start asking questions, 'What is this all about? Why are you doing this? Who is this Dorothy Day?'"

Of course, Dorothy Day was the co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, and she believed tradition was "a living thing," Pfeil says. "Tradition did not mean for her that you grip things past in such a rigid way that they can’t be life-giving today."

Continuing his Dorothy Day/Catholic Worker theme at Duke's Leadership Education blog, Byassee writes about a Catholic Worker house in St. Louis run by a Presbyterian couple.

Both pieces are very interesting reading--especially coming from a Protestant seminary's site.