Day felt the San Francisco earthquake was God speaking to her as a child

Day was heavily influenced by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy; went radical in NY and reconverted to Catholicism in jail

Lots of suicide and death in Percy’s family

Percy highly influenced by Brothers Karamazov: pursed medicine instead of writing like Ivan

As preteen Percy became BFFs with Shelby Foote

Day hung and drank with the homeless in wartime, a Llewyn Davis kind of life. Friends with Eugene O’Neill, whose poetry readings inspired her back to Mass.

Both Merton and Day left out exploits from their memoirs

Day worked as nurse in Brooklyn during flu epidemic and learned value of work and discipline

Sacco/Vanzetti trial caused rift between Day and her man, and drove her to be catechized

O’Connor’s adolescent journal cover: “Mind your own bidnis”

Catholic Worker pacifism re: Spanish civil war cost subscribers who favored just-war theory

Merton on the Holy Ghost: “Although He is right with is and in us and out of us and all through us we have to go on journeys to find him.”

All found counterparts through correspondence: Percy with essays to the world, Merton through imaginative identification with distant writers, O’Connor by casting her partner as an adversary to be won over, Day in stirring epistles to the community that had gathered around her.

Day, in fundraising column: “It is always a feast where love is, and where love is, God is.”

From O’Connor’s correspondence: religion is not a ‘blueprint’ but an act of faith: “When I ask myself how I know I believe, I have no satisfactory answer at all, no assurance at all, no feeling at all. I can only say with Peter, Lord I believe, help me in my unbelief…”

Merton: “For wisdom cannot be learned from a book. It is acquired only in living formation … It is ‘lived.’ And unless one ‘lives’ it, one cannot ‘have’ it.”