Dorothy Day Research Paper

Words: 936
Pages: 4

Dorothy Day was born in Brooklyn, New York in the year 1897. She grew up in the middle class, nominal Christian family. Her father earned money as a sports editor of one of the San Francisco papers, where they had moved during Dorothy’s childhood. Her parents were not attending a church most the time. Naturally, Dorothy was not led to build a strong sense for Christianity. In her early age, she showed a marked religious streak with reading a Bible. When she was eight years old, she experienced her first praying. “I believed, but I did not know what I believed.” (20) She felt lost and lonely because she was the only member of the family, who went to church, prayed on her knees, and sing hymns. So, the question is: why she still wanted to become a Christian despite she was completely alone in that? When Dorothy was becoming adult she experienced a hard time when she was separated from her family, was not able to write, had no job, so that means no money. It seems like she lost her faith for a while. In her book, she said: “For me, Christ no longer walked the streets of this world.” (46) When Dorothy was spending time in jail and went on hunger strike, she began asking for a Bible. She read it in sense of coming back to something of her childhood that she lost. But still, the pride inside of her was fighting on. She wanted to be independent …show more content…
Dorothy as a passionate reader was influenced by those books: En Route, The Oblate, and The Cathedral. She described these books in words: “…they made me feel that I too could be at home in the Catholic Church.” (107) When suddenly, a man came to her life and everything changed. In 1920’s they lived a bohemian life. Her partner Lionel, a journalist with whom she was passionately in love, enjoyed having his sex life with her but wasn’t at all interested in having children or being married. Which was a problem, because Dorothy became