Forum on Personalism and the Catholic Worker

Dear Reader,

I am pleased to introduce here an essay forum that explores the formation of the Catholic Worker Movement and its animating philosophy of personalism. The forum, inspired in part by the September 2024 Peter Maurin Conference in Chicago, begins tomorrow and continues for the next month and a half, with one essay published per week.

The first essay, by Renée Roden and James Murphy, provides an overview of the life and philosophy of Peter Maurin, who co-founded the Catholic Worker with Dorothy Day. Arthur Aghajanian then examines the wood engravings of Franz Eichenberg, which provided the Catholic Worker’s newspaper with its unique “visual grammar.” In the third essay, Marty Tomszak considers how Jacques Maritain’s personalism informed his view of political sovereignty. The forum concludes with Stefan Gigacz’s genealogy of the Catholic Worker, tracing its roots back to the nineteenth-century French Catholic movement Le Sillon, while also tracing forward Le Sillon’s influence on the Second Vatican Council.

Across these works, you’ll see how twentieth-century Catholic intellectuals and artists drew creatively on the past—from the Irish monks of the middle ages, the tradition of wood engravings, and medieval understandings of sovereignty—to respond to the challenges of their moment. We hope this forum similarly furnishes inspiration to those seeking faithful and imaginative ways of engaging our shared present.

We invite you to join us tomorrow for the opening essay—and to keep an eye out for similar forum-style offerings in the coming months.

Genealogically yours,

Anthony Shoplik
Executive Editor, GenMod

Dorothy Day, Jubilee Magazine, 1955