THIS FRIDAY, the Humanities Forum will host Tom Jeannot, Professor of Philosophy at Gonzaga University. This talk will be the opening address of the St. Nicholas of Myra Conference on Catholic Social thought. Jeannot will investigate Dorothy Day’s seemingly paradoxical humanism and personalism by developing a fundamental contrast between two forms of humanism, naturalistic humanism and Catholic and Christian personalism.
The paradox of Dorothy Day, the “Catholic Communist,” can be stated in one way by Dom Helder Camara’s aphorism: “When I feed the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.” In another way, it can be stated as Day stated it herself in a letter to Stanley Vishnewski: “When it comes to the Catholic church, I go to the right as far as I can go. But when it comes to labor, pacifism and civil rights, then I go as far as I can to the left.” This paper investigates the paradox in a philosophical way, by developing a fundamental contrast between two forms of humanism, naturalistic humanism and Catholic and Christian personalism.
Tom Jeannot has been at Gonzaga since 1986. He works on moral philosophy, personalism, philosophical hermeneutics, Hegelian Marxism and Critical Theory, classical American philosophy, and the thought of Bernard Lonergan.
