The Eleventh Virgin

Though Dorothy Day may be best known today for her religious peace activism and her role in founding the Catholic Worker movement, she lived a bohemian youth in the Lower West Side of New York City during the late 1910s and early 1920s. As an editor for radical socialist publications like The Liberator and The Masses, Day was involved in several left-wing causes as well as the Silent Sentinels' 1917 protest for women's suffrage in front of the White House. The Eleventh Virgin is a semi-autobiographical novel told through the eyes of June Henreddy, a young radical journalist whose fictional life closely parallels Day's own life experiences, including her eventual disillusionment with her bohemian lifestyle. Though later derided by Day as "a very bad book," The Eleventh Virgin captures a vibrant image of New York's radical counterculture in the early 20th century and sheds a light on the youthful misadventures of a woman who would eventually be praised by Pope Francis for her dream of "social justice and the rights of persons" during his historic address to a joint session of Congress in 2015.

Though Dorothy Day may be best known today for her religious peace activism and her role in founding the Catholic Worker movement, she lived a bohemian youth in the Lower West Side of New York City during the late 1910s and early 1920s. As an editor for radical socialist publications like The Liberator and The Masses, Day was involved in several left-wing causes as well as the Silent Sentinels’ 1917 protest for women’s suffrage in front of the White House. The Eleventh Virgin is a semi-autobiographical novel told through the eyes of June Henreddy, a young radical journalist whose fictional life closely parallels Day’s own life experiences, including her eventual disillusionment with her bohemian lifestyle. Though later derided by Day as “a very bad book,” The Eleventh Virgin captures a vibrant image of New York’s radical counterculture in the early 20th century and sheds a light on the youthful misadventures of a woman who would eventually be praised by Pope Francis for her dream of “social justice and the rights of persons” during his historic address to a joint session of Congress in 2015.

Catholicism was all over movie screens in 2004. Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ was at the center of a media firestorm for months. A priest was a crucial character in the Academy Award-winning Million Dollar Baby. Everyone, it seemed, was talking about how religious stories should be represented, marketed, and received. Catholic characters, spaces, and rituals have been stock features in popular films since the silent era. An intensely visual religion with a well-defined ritual and authority system, Catholicism lends itself to the drama and pageantry of film. Moviegoers watch as Catholic visionaries interact with the supernatural, priests counsel their flocks, reformers fight for social justice, and bishops wield authoritarian power. Rather than being marginal to American popular culture, Catholic people, places, and rituals are all central to the world of the movie. Catholics in the Movies begins with an introductory essay that orients readers to the ways that films appear in culture and describes the broad trends that can be seen in the movies' hundred-year history of representing Catholics. Each chapter is written by a noted scholar of American religion who concentrates on one movie engaging important historical, artistic, and religious issues. Each then places the film within American cultural and social history, discusses the film as an expression of Catholic concerns of the period, and relates the film to others of its genre. Tracing the story of American Catholic history through popular films, Catholics in the Movies should be a valuable resource for anyone interested in American Catholicism and religion and film.

Fifty years ago, Dorothy Day sold the first issue of the Catholic Worker in New York, and one of the most remarkable newspapers in American history was born. It advocated something revolutionary for 1933 America: the union of Catholicism with a passionate concern for social justice and with personal activism. Today, the Catholic Worker, still a monthly with some 100,000 subscribers, remains a leader in pacifism and social justice activism. The dean of American journalism historians, Edwin Emery, recently acknowledged the extremely significant role of the Catholic Worker in the history of advocacy and religious journalism. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker examines Dorothy Day's vital role as editor, publisher, and chief writer--the person who guided the paper's content and tone--until her death in 1980 at the age of 83. A devout Catholic, Dorothy Day never criticized the Church's teachings--only its failure to live up to them. Her determined leadership gave the Catholic Worker its consistency and continuity through even those periods in American history most hostile to its message. Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker is the first full-length, scholarly study of the newspaper. Drawing primarily on the Dorothy Day-Catholic Worker Collection at Marquette University and on interviews with former Catholic Worker editors from the 1930s on, it traces the paper's history, highlighting crisis points such as the Spanish Civil War and World War II, when individuals selling the Catholic Worker were sometimes beaten in the streets. During the McCarthy era, the Korean War, and the war in Vietnam, the Catholic Worker maintained its commitment to peace and social justice. A final chapter links the Catholic bishops' recent pastoral letter on nuclear warfare with the peace leadership provided by the Catholic Worker.

James Fisher argues that Catholic culture was transformed when products of the "immigrant church," largely inspired by converts like Dorothy Day, launched a variety of spiritual, communitarian, and literary experiments. He also explores the life and works

Sonja Getz of Dorfburg, Texas, who upon reaching her 30th birthday decides to go in search of her long-lost father. She shares this odyssey with reluctant partner Prairie James, a professional rope-twirler doing the second-rate rodeo circuit.

"In this early autobiographical work with a new foreword by Pope Francis, Dorothy Day offers the first account of her dramatic conversion"--