"There are not enough historians among us."

One thing that stood out while reading a decade of Dorothy Day's columns is how much time she spends in sharing the stories of ordinary, local activists and saints. These are the people that she regularly visited and corresponded with, regular folks—families, carpenters, painters—who were responding to need in their own context.

In one column from 1967, she laments the way many younger people who are engaged in activism did not know the history of all these people who made up the Catholic Worker of decades past. This is what it is to record the lives of the saints, not to capture a few great deeds, but to show how their faith led them to act in many daily little ways.

I'm drawn to this idea of how her columns helped bring together this community of workers across the whole country and how sharing and celebrating their stories made them a part of it all.