Easy Essays
Jordan, Patrick
Commonweal: 540 In Brief EASY ESSAYS, by Peter Maurin. Franciscan Herald Press, $6.95, 216 pp. This is the most recent edition of what might be called the "little green book" of the Catholic...
...Modem society has made the bank account the standard of values," Maurin writes...
...While these essays are circumscribed by their time — note Maurin's essays on the racism and anti-Semitism of the Nazis — their application is as fresh as the morning paper...
...His antidote: Christian per-sonalism...
...This new edition of Easy Essays is enriched by twenty masterful woodcuts by Fritz Eichenberg, and an up-to-date foreword by Eileen Egan...
...A personalist is a go-giver, not a go-getter," he comments, one who "has a social doctrine of the common good" and spreads it "through words and deeds," creating community...
...Maurin and Day were both a remarkable blend of the radical and the orthodox...
...Maurin was Dorothy Day's mentor and collaborator in fdunding and directing the Catholic Worker paper and movement, one of American Catholicism's most creative, challenging, and enduring social contributions...
...ing exploded the powerful dynamite of its own social teaching...
...If books are to be judged by their fruits, Easy Essays must rank as a virtual seed catalog...
...As Maurin writes, "The life of a Christian must be a life of sacrifice...
...P.J...
...The bishops would do well to consult him today...
...Maurin's style was that of a repetitive street preacher, one graced at times with the poetic effect of a Charles Peguy...
...Such is Maurin's own enduring legacy...
...Letters of not more than 250 or 300 words naturally have a better chance of being published...
...Maurin faulted the church for not havCommonweal welcomes letters on subjects treated in its pages...
...Maurin gave Day a sense of Christian history and tradition which launched and undergirded all the small, incremental contributions the Catholic Worker continues to make...
...Written by Peter Maurin in the decades of the Great Depression and the Second World War — Maurin died in 1949 — most of these deceptively "easy" essays (or outlines) originally appeared in The Catholic Worker...
...As Dorothy Day wrote, he believed in "driving home his point by constant repetition, like the dropping of water on the stones which were our hearts...
...This is the most recent edition of what might be called the "little green book" of the Catholic Worker movement...
Vol. 112 • October 1985 • No. 17
