As for Dorothy Day, I assume the attraction is her charitable work, the living out of her Catholic Christianity in works of corporal mercy. I don’t assume it is a blanket endorsement of everything she did, just as you could take from Wendell Berry’s writings, for example, what seems reasonable and meaningful. Like you, I have no time for straight-up pacifism. Nor, I suspect, do most of those crunchies who admire Dorothy Day. Anyone who holds up the welfare of the community and the family as two of the priorities and chief goods in life cannot be a pacifist, as he would be required in the end to sacrifice those goods for the “greater good” of non-violence, which is obviously a very twisted sense of “greater good.” Pure pacifism is a morally indefensible position, as it assumes that it would be better to lie down for the barbarians (or whoever it is who happens to be attacking you) and allow everyone around you to be killed, harmed or endangered for the sake of being “peaceful,” in addition to the obvious practical drawbacks of being overwhelmed and subjugated by a hostile force.

I don’t get too hung up on this stuff, because I don’t go with the cosmetic quoting that many small minds engage in. (You like Wendell Berry? Why aren’t you a farmer then? Why do you use a computer? You’re a romantic delusional!) I don’t see reading and absorbing “radicals” as implying that what may be taken from them is meaningless or somehow compromised if one doesn’t try to live like them in some terribly conscious, intentional way. They give me a mental reference point, a different logic, stuff to consider on my own way. They had their path; I have mine.

Maybe you can explain the Dorothy Day appeal to me among some crunchies. I don’t get it. OK, they did a lot of good stuff and were Chestertonians. Is that such a big deal? I’ve read a few slices of Maurin that seem like standard naive leftist ranting. What sticks in my mind about Day is a silly note she wrote Eleanor Roosevelt regarding her (Day’s) protest of atomic weapons, which got her arrested.

I don’t dig pacifism. WMDs, war, and killing are all abominable and likely damning of most participants, but laying down before barbarians is worse. There’s an important role for certain saints to live by the radicalism of the spiritual truth that it is better to suffer than to do evil, but generally these people do not have children. (Perhaps this is an unexamined argument against married priests. Aren’t priests sworn to non-violence?)

I do think violence is justifiable, but I don’t think it is ever morally pure. It is always an evil. But I don’t jump from that idea to the conclusion that we must always avoid evil, even when it is possible to do so and there are not worse consequences to be had due to the avoidance.