Book Blurb – Unruly Saint: Dorothy Day’s Radical Vision and Its Challenge For Our Times; by D.L. Mayfield

Unruly Saint: Dorothy Day’s Radical Vision and Its Challenge for Our Times by D L Mayfield

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Occasionally people will ask me what to read to learn more about Dorothy Day. Of course my first go-to recommendation is Day’s own collected writings from the Catholic Worker. But I’m glad to now have D.L. Mayfield’s new book as a good biographical alternative.

Mayfield writes from a place of clear love and admiration, and it comes through in every page of the book. I find that many of the recent biographies that have come out recently, with a more dryly historical leaning, focus on the difficulties and impracticalities of the life she lived, which overshadow the radical ideals and deep faith that drove her. Those books are excellent in their own way, but I worry that as an introduction to Dorothy Day they fail to capture what makes her such a necessary and vital voice in the Church — both in her own time and in our own.

Which is why I’m so glad to have a biography that gets it. “Unruly Saint” presents all the difficulties and impracticalities but also understands the religious convictions behind the life she chose.



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