Explore "Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century" by John Loughery on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
WILLIAM JAMES'S THE VARIETIES OF Religious Experience was precisely the right book for Dorothy to have stumbled on during this period of exploration and doubt. James wasn't writing as a theologian, anthropologist, or historian of religions but as a philosopher and psychologist interested in the psychology of religion, and the scion of the brilliant James family wasn't in the business of proselytizing or denigrating. Though the book dates from 1903, when James, a Harvard professor, finished delivering the text as the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, he might as well have been speaking as Dorothy's contemporary.
The idea that faith belonged to another era, that its societal origins were rooted in premodern superstition, that its personal origins could be located in a flight from fear and insecurity, was widespread in Europe and the United States in the 1920s, not least among the people Dorothy knew and loved. Approaching the subject from a radically different angle, James asked his readers to make an effort to clear away preconceptions, whether favorable or critical, and to consider the connections between faith and strength of mind, the notion of faith as a critique of modern life, the varied meanings of saintliness and the "mystery of self-surrender," the long and provocative history of mysticism, and the usefulness of an unfanatical asceticism. He wrote as well about the plausibility of human concepts of God evolving over time, and the unseen as an aspect of reality no less potent than the seen.