Dorothy Day: Love in Action by Patrick Jordan. Collegeville, USA: Liturgical Press, 2015. 132 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8146-3703-6
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Prophets, by definition, make us uncomfortable.Their acute insight into the pitfalls of human society, and their incessant clarion calls to justice, make us squirm in our comfortable pews.Dorothy Day , the prickly American prophetess who, along with Peter Maurin, founded the Catholic Worker movement, elicited, for many, this experience of prophetic discomfort.It is into this uneasy space that Patrick Jordan ventures with his pocket biography, Dorothy Day: Love in Action.Jordan is well-placed to write such a biography -he lived and worked with Day during the last 12 years of her life.His writing is steeped in the ethos of the Catholic Worker and filled with stories of direct encounters with the force for good that was Dorothy Day.Perhaps in honour of Day's own journalistic background, the biography adopts a newsy and accessible style that will engage a broad readership.For those unfamiliar with Dorothy Day, it will serve as a gateway into the life of this remarkable woman.For those who already know her well, this biography provides a depth of insight into her psychological and spiritual life that only a friend could provide.All this is done without falling into the trap of hagiography, respecting the paradoxical and complex nature of Dorothy's personality.Jordan's contribution is part of Liturgical Press's People of God series, which aims to provide "inspiring biographies for the general reader" (according to https://www.litpress.org/Category/S-POG/People-of-God).As such, it is not meant to be a scholarly text.The author's familiarity with English literature nevertheless seeps through; for example, Day's own life is reflected in light of the writings of George Eliot, among others.Careful use is also made of Dorothy's own writings (both personal and published) and commentaries from others who knew her well.Love in Action works as a psychological and spiritual memoir of Day.It begins with an overview of her personality and many conflicting traits.Fiery and reserved, sensual and pious, angry and humble, compassionate and short-tempered, the list of her characteristics portrays a very human saint, full of paradox and passionate love for God and for God's most vulnerable people.Jordan then continues with a brief chronology of what he calls "Dorothy's peripatetic life" (p.13).This section reveals a woman responding to her times, impacted by such diverse events as the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, two World Wars, the Great Depression, Vatican II, and the Vietnam War.Once these basics are covered, Jordan then moves into more thematic reflections on Dorothy Day's life -her morality and radicalism, her conversion experiences, her guiding principles and personalism, her relationship with the Roman Catholic Church and her voluntary poverty, her struggles with depression and her hard-won ability to embrace delight.Each well-crafted segment serves to whet the appetite for a more in-depth study.The volume unavoidably suffers from its brevity.As much is said by what is left out about Day's life as by what is included.For example, very little is revealed about her family
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.110 | 0.043 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".