Why This Text Matters | The Long Loneliness | Kristine Culp

Religious studies courses can feature a broad range and variety of texts, including anything from The Daodejing, to The Mishnah, to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, to Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger, to Said’s Orientalism. The Marty Center partnered with the Undergraduate Religious Studies Program to design “Why This Text Matters” as a series of videos to help faculty prepare for courses, their students, and anyone generally curious about important texts in the study of religion. In the space of about 30 minutes, viewers can gain a deeper understanding of the context, themes, and significance of texts taught by experts at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
About the Text:
Dorothy Day’s "The Long Loneliness" (1952) offers both an autobiographical confession styled after Augustine and a portrait of the Catholic Worker movement which she co-founded at the height of the Great Depression. Day portrays a search for a synthesis of religion and systemic change in response to dire poverty and the resulting commitment to build “a society in which it is easier to do good.” With pointed social analysis, theologically rich gestures, and palpable impatience, the text invites its reader to see, hear, taste, and touch dehumanizing conditions and also what is good and lovely. Among the text’s pedagogies of attention are brief iconographies of unconventional “saints who try to change the social order” but who might not immediately be perceived as exemplars. Day’s conviction of a whole love, united in God, and that truth is truth, wherever it is found and whoever speaks it, drives her to work toward social conditions that bring love, community, justice, and truth into fuller expression.