Renée Roden
(She/Her)
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Covers:
Religion, Gender, Higher Education, New York City, Transit/Climate, the Great Lakes
Articles by Renée Roden
Growing a Resilient Community at Dandelion Village
Dandelion House in April 2026. Portland, Ore.— On a quiet tributary of the Willamette River in Milwaukie, a southerly suburb of Portland, Oregon, a radical community grows on the banks of the creek. Dandelion House is, more properly, a collection of houses. A friend of the community jokingly calls them an “empire,” they prefer the term “village,” but either way, the work is growing in not a dissimilar way to their namesake native plant, often maligned as a weed.
Learning from the Movement to Stop the War on Terror
For me and many of my fellow Zillennials, some of the first political images I can recall were the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Absorbing television images of the two planes hitting the towers was the beginning of my political consciousness.
Saint Bénézet Catholic Worker Builds Bridges in the Bible Belt
Saint Bénézet Catholic Worker Community with the Oklahoma City Democratic Socialists of America Chapter at Church of the Redeemer in Oklahoma City on Christmas Eve, 2025 Oklahoma City, Okla.— Oklahoma City was founded in the midst of Oklahoma’s land runs, in the late 19th century. The city began as a tent encampment for settlers pouring into “unassigned” lands in Native American territory.
Laboring for Beauty: The Tradition of Catholic Worker Art
High atop a peak in Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights, the Los Angeles Catholic Worker house could easily be mistaken for a fantastical religious art gallery. The Ammon Hennacy House of Hospitality, named for a peace activist who joined the Catholic Worker movement in Milwaukee in the 1940s, is a colorfully painted Victorian manse.
Art - America Magazine
Posted inArt Since the first Catholic Worker artists filled the pages of its newspaper with woodblock prints, art has been an important dimension of the organization’s vision of the reconstruction of the social order. Posted inArt A blockbuster exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York offers a spiritual way of seeing. Posted inArt By engaging with art imaginatively, we can encounter that deeper reality that the Surrealists have always sought in their artwork.
Dorothy Day
Posted inArt Since the first Catholic Worker artists filled the pages of its newspaper with woodblock prints, art has been an important dimension of the organization’s vision of the reconstruction of the social order. Posted inFaith in Focus Dorothy Day once told me, “When they call you a saint it means that you are not to be taken seriously.” Yet she took saints extremely seriously.
Social Justice
Posted inArt Since the first Catholic Worker artists filled the pages of its newspaper with woodblock prints, art has been an important dimension of the organization’s vision of the reconstruction of the social order. Posted inDispatches Activists work to assist detained migrants and their families as protests against the ICE facility enter their second week.
Art for the October 2020 issue of The Catholic Agitator by Becky McIntyre I killed a spider Not a murderous brown recluse Nor even a black widow And if the truth were told this Was only a small Sort of papery spider Who should have run When I picked up the book But she didn’t And she scared me And I smashed her I don’t think I’m allowed To kill something Because I am Frightened - Nikki Giovanni We are all members of the mystical body of Christ.
"You can't put the genie back in the bag"
CW Reads Catholic Workers respond to the "fourth industrial revolution" of artificial intelligence, using the "dynamite" of the Catholic Worker tradition of personalism, dignity of work, and solidarity Art by Monica Welch (DovetailInk) - Artist Statement Below Maryhouse, the last Catholic Worker House where Dorothy Day lived in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, has long been a Luddite stronghold: no internet, no email address or website–one year, the phone was disconnected entirely–and the...
Pentecost Is More Than Speaking in Tongues—It’s Learning to Sing Together
In a dark church, a dozen disciples gather in the upper room of the choir loft. We warm up our voices. We practice our hymns. Although we are not silent, in many ways, we are the disciples on the eve of Pentecost: waiting for the Spirit to descend. I’m a lifelong choir member. I caught the bug in high school, joined a liturgical choir in college because the boy I had a crush on told me to, and I was briefly a member of St. Patrick’s Cathedral Choir in New York City.
'Yesteryear' and the comedy and tragedy of the tradwife
Yesteryear 400 pages; Knopf $30.00 The "tradwife" — a portmanteau neologism referring to a "traditional wife" who embraces domestic labor and subservience to her husband — has become a lightning rod for internet ire. But what is often overlooked is that, setting aside its ideology, the aesthetics of tradwifery online is often downright funny.
Rather than Reaching for "Pie in the Sky," Catholic Workers Make Peace on Earth
"...the hope of getting our pie in the sky when we die without giving us hell here and now” — Peter Maurin We can find a resounding hope in the coincidence of opposites, can't we? Something in Peter Maurin's words strikes me with both the levity and gravity of an Aesop's fable — harrowing lessons dunked in jollity. This is exactly how I have known most Catholic Workers to be: happy to be hopeful, but never neglecting to call attention to the hell we make on earth in the here and now.
"We must not be crazy, and if we are, others are too"
La Sagrada Familia at the U.S.-Mexico Border Wall Bethany Hobbs and Duncan Hilton got married on Zoom in 2020. They were both committed Christians and interested in putting their faith into action. Duncan grew up in a mainline Protestant family. His search for alternative Christian community began after college when he lived and worked with people with disabilities at a Camphill community in Ireland.
The Culture That Still Consumes Women
Two years after Jeffrey Epstein was first convicted of soliciting a minor for prostitution, I began my first year of college. During my college years of the early 2010s, there was a righteous reckoning with the frat-bro, party-heavy, alcohol-fueled sexual assault campus culture. We were raised on “no means no,” bystander prevention, and the righteous belief that believing women, listening to their stories, reporting them to the authorities, despite the cost, would bring justice to light.
Build Community, Walk in Beauty: Catholic Workers Share Wisdom for Dark Times
Over the past few weeks, I have been leading a reading group of Dorothy Day’s writings, focusing on her craft as a journalist, her role as a prophet against the “rotten, decadent, putrid” system and her spirituality as a mystic in the midst of poverty. In one of our readings, from Robert Ellsberg’s collection of her spiritual writings, a participant highlighted a curious phrase: “the sensuality of despair.” The passage is from her collection of writings, On Pilgrimage, from 1948.
Bảy’s extended family. Photo: Mary Farrell. “How can you see Christ in people?” This is the question that people are forever asking Catholic Workers, Dorothy Day wrote in a 1964 column. “It is most surely an exercise of faith for us to see Christ in each other.
Catholic Workers “Prepare for Peace”
“Those who long for peace must prepare for war,” repeats US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth as if it were common sense. But how sensical is it really when in the year 2026, despite all kinds of human and technological advancements, we continue to fight for domination over land, resources, and each other? We harness every human and technological advancement in preparing and waging war. When will our leaders start preparing for peace?
RNS | Covering the world of religion.
(RNS) — At a recent check-in at our local U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, a friend and fellow parishioner at our Catholic church came out wearing an ankle monitor.
"Be part of the repair": Women of the Catholic Worker Movement on Social Justice Today
Via the Dorothy Day Guild “Women have always been part of the Jesus movement,” said Michelle Sherman, director of Pax Christi USA. Sherman was one of the panelists at the Dorothy Day Guild’s International Women’s Day panel on Sunday, March 8.
Catholic Workers Wage Peace in the Midst of War
This week: On Alex Pretti and Minneapolis; a Kansas Catholic Worker on “drive through charity”; Steve Jacobs, troubadour of resistance, shares a humorous story of peace-making turned upside-down “The Waging of Peace is as Costly as the Waging of War” Alex Pretti’s Memorial - Nicollet Avenue and 26th Street, Minneapolis, February 27, 2026 The Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis has become, in the words of one spectator, “militarized.” Until mid-January, protesters, advocates,...
In Lent, Catholic Workers Sing the Joyful Song of Resistance
This past Thursday, I reported on the particulars of last weekend’s Catholic Worker Farm Gathering in Luck, Wisconsin. We’re hoping to bring you some of the excellent talks from the gathering in future issues of Roundtable. In the meantime, though, the farm gathering has left me thinking a lot about just how good many contemporary Catholic Workers are at practicing the “duty of delight.” In fact, I’d go so far as to call it the superpower of the contemporary movement.
The Work of Christian Unity Continues
On Monday, members of the London Catholic Worker gathered outside the British Home Office to pray for migrants and refugees. The vigil in honor of refugees who have lost their lives seeking safety in the United Kingdom and Europe, and victims of border policies throughout the world, takes place the third Monday of each month.
“This is her time,” Catholic Workers Bring Dorothy Day’s Radical Witness to Rome
ROME— The Dorothy Day Guild did not plan for their pilgrimage to Rome to coincide with Pope Leo XIV’s praise of Dorothy Day. But the timing could not be more apt. On Saturday, Pope Leo XIV praised Day as the “small, great” American woman in his Jubilee audience. “She had a fire inside,” he said. On Wednesday, a group of 12 Catholic Workers and Dorothy Day Guild members attended Pope Leo’s general audience in St. Peter’s Square.
Pope Leo: “Dorothy Day Took a Stand”
When Renée asked me to step in on this week’s roundtable while she is traveling, I was afraid it might be a slow week in Catholic Worker-land.
A Catholic Worker Begins in Vermont
Some Catholic Workers begin with a soup kitchen, a common garden, a community dinner, or a group of friends “sitting there talking.” For a new Catholic Worker in Vermont, their community began with a series of talks on Catholic Social Teaching. A week after Pope Leo XIV was elected on May 8, Deacon Josh McDonald began a series on Catholic Social Thought at his parish.
San Antonio Catholic Worker Celebrates 40 Years
In 1984, Dee Sanchez was studying in a master's program at the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio. For her master’s project, she decided to open a Catholic Worker house. Buying a six bedroom house of hospitality and opening a soup kitchen was certainly a constant source of learning. “It really radicalized me to a profound trust that things were going to be okay,” Sanchez, now 84, said in a phone call with Roundtable. That trust seems to have never failed her.
"Steadfast in the work of liberation": A Catholic Worker Report from Palestine Day of Action
Washington, D.C. — Art Laffin, of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker in Washington, D.C., participated in the Global Day of Action for Palestine last Thursday (September 18). Laffin reports that roughly 50 people attended a prayer service outside the offices of the Friends Committee on National Legislation that was sponsored by Christians for Ceasefire and Just Peace.
Trump's flawed DC takeover lacks factual, legal rationale
For the first time since residents of Washington won the right to elect their own representatives in 1973, also known as home rule, a president has attempted to federally take over the District of Columbia police, the Metropolitan Police Department, or MPD. As a Washington, D.C., law professor with a focus on victims' rights and a former assistant U.S. attorney in Washington, I have seen over many decades the complexities of crime both in the District of Columbia and across the country.
A group of 18 pilgrims blocked the entrance to a naval base in Washington State on August 5, the eve of the 80th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima. The vehicles that were stalled in front of the intergenerational line of activists holding signs on the road were not happy. “There was way more traffic than we anticipated,” said Jeromiah Taylor, one of the pilgrims.
Too little, too late: The church's inadequate response to AI-human evolution
While the Vatican acknowledges stages of technological development, it lacks a model of integrating science and religion that can adequately assess the influence of technology. The Vatican's approach, while ethically sophisticated, seems to operate within what we might call a "static divine" framework — God as absolute and self-sufficient being whose creation must be protected from technological overreach.
The Leo Chronicles: Nagasaki's tragic anniversary
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“There are people who are paying attention”: Catholic Workers Advocate for Palestine
Duluth, Minnesota, might seem like a world away from the Gaza Strip. But, on Sunday night, the Hildegard House Catholic Worker community gathered with 40 local activists to bring the suffering of their 2 million brothers and sisters facing bombardment and starvation in the Gaza Strip a bit closer to home.
St Pope Paul VI offered a vision of a less rigid church
Pope Paul VI’s legacy of ecumenism and compassion offers a powerful model for unity in a divided church and world. People say you never forget a first impression, but I honestly couldn’t tell you my first impression of St. Pope Paul VI. At first, I suppose, Paul VI was just another Roman numeral hanging on the 5-square-foot chart of 265 pontiffs that hung in our family computer room.
Catholic Worker Archivists Keep 90 Years of History Alive
On the third floor of Marquette University’s Raynor Library, the university archives welcomes students and researchers into a wood-paneled reading room lined with large windows overlooking the quad and flooding the half-dozen reading tables in the room with warm light. Photo murals and glass cases display relics and icons of the history preserved in the archives' collections. Among those faces on the wall is Dorothy Day’s.
Theater as sacramental: How drama can deepen our spiritual lives
At our parish Lenten retreat this year, there were several impassioned skits representing Christ’s healing miracles and the miraculous catch of fish—you know the one, where Jesus godsplains fishing to lifelong fishermen: We’ve been fishing all night long. Okay, but really, trust me, the carpenter from landlocked Nazareth—just try the other side. This small exercise in biblical imagination was performed in our humble parish soup kitchen.
“Boy, I did a great job. I fulfilled the Gospel”: Harry Murray on the Challenge of Hospitality.
Roundtable caught up with Harry Murray, emeritus professor of sociology at Nazareth University in Rochester, New York, on Zoom. Last month, Roundtable republished a chapter of Murray’s “Do Not Neglect Hospitality,” a book based on his dissertation from Syracuse University that Temple University Press originally published more than 30 years ago. Murray said he was inspired to crack open the book once again himself.
"A Voice for the Revolution": Translating Dorothy Day
If all her friends jumped off a cliff, Magdalena Muñoz Pizzulic, 32, would probably refrain. But when one of them was applying to master’s degrees in theology, she decided to jump in on the opportunity. “I saw him applying, and I was—I don't know what went through my brain—but I was just like, okay, maybe I should try to apply to,” Muñoz said in a recent Zoom call with Roundtable.
Review: The Catholic fragments of art, faith and sex in 1980s pop culture
Not to judge a book by its cover, but Paul Elie’s new one serves as a sterling representative for the story within. A photograph depicts a group of protesters in the ACT UP movement staging a “die-in” on Fifth Avenue in New York City in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, “America’s parish church,” during Advent 1989, in protest of Cardinal John O’Connor’s statements on condoms, homosexuality and sex education. The protestors occupy the foreground; the church looms in the background.
"Community is the best defense we have"
At Roundtable, we like to say we “cover the Catholic Worker”—but the truth is, we cover only a tiny fraction of what goes on in CW communities around the world every week. Much of the movement’s real work isn’t flashy or headline-grabbing; it’s mopping floors, cooking meals, mowing lawns, scrubbing toilets, and filing paperwork—all the mundane work of keeping a household going.
We Said ‘Never Again,’ but It Seems the Violence Has Never Ended
PANKAJ MISHRA OPENS The World After Gaza: A History with the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising in German-occupied Poland. The Jews imprisoned in the ghetto fought their Nazi captors for “a few desperate weeks” until they were crushed. Mishra quotes one of few survivors, Marek Edelman, who “was ‘terribly afraid’ that ‘nobody in the world would notice a thing,’ and ‘nothing, no message about us, would ever make it out.’” The Israel Defense Forces’ ongoing destruction of Gaza following the Oct.
Pope Leo XIV to Journalists: "We must reject the paradigm of war"
Today, one week into the papacy of Leo XIV, marks the 134th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the landmark Catholic Social Teaching encyclical on the rights of workers by his predecessor Pope Leo XIII. May 15 also marks the day, 76 years ago, when Peter Maurin, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, died in Newburgh, New York, at the Catholic Worker’s Maryfarm. On Monday, I attended Pope Leo XIV’s audience with journalists in Paul VI Audience Hall in Vatican City.
Of New Things: Roundtable Reports on Pope Leo XIV from St. Peter's Square
VATICAN CITY — At 6:08 PM Rome time, on the third vote of the conclave, white smoke poured out of the chimney of the Sistine Chapel. Shouts, cheers, and cries of “papa!” erupted throughout St. Peter’s Square. I arrived in Rome just a little over 36 hours before then. And, in true Catholic Worker fashion, did not know where I was going to sleep that night when I landed at Fiumicino Airport.
"A Philosophy Ninety-Two Years Old That Looks Like New": Catholic Workers Celebrate 92 Years
The Feast of St. Joseph the Worker, International Labor Day, on May 1, marked ninety-two years since Dorothy Day distributed 2,500 copies of The Catholic Worker in Union Square, boldly competing with the Communists’ The Daily Worker, and quickly edging it out in popularity, printing more than ten times as many copies a year later, and reaching its apex of 195,000 copies as it marked its fifth anniversary in 1938. On May 1, I also finally finished Dorothy Day’s 1962 memoir, Loaves and Fishes.
“The Gospel of mercy at the center”: Pope Francis
At the Peter Maurin Conference this past September in Chicago, Jon Sozek of Albertus Magnus College highlighted Pope Francis’ pastoral style in his keynote on the Catholic Worker’s guiding philosophy of personalism. He called it “lightning bolt personalism,” active, dynamic, hard to define, because it was not based in theory or disincarnate academia, but was based in encounter: in meeting people face to face.
“Peace is not possible with a faulty memory": Dorothy Day's Jubilee Witness
NEW YORK “Dorothy Day is a prophet, the great prophet of the Second Vatican Council,” said Sean Domencic of the Rechabite Catholic Worker on Saturday, as a group of several dozen Catholic Workers and friends gathered to discuss the life of Dorothy Day. Domencic’s words offered a rousing thesis for the symposium, a collaboration of the Dorothy Day Guild and the Dorothy Day Center at Manhattan University in the Bronx.
'Stone Yard Devotional' sets forgiveness, empathy and death in an Australian convent
Charlotte Wood's Stone Yard Devotional takes place in a convent in the Australian outback during a plague. The novel has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize. (Unsplash/Mario La Pergola) Stone Yard Devotional Charlotte Wood 297 pages; Riverhead Books $28.00 There is a plane of existence where daily worries — using the bathroom, paying the bills, winning popularity — evaporate instantly.
"Love disarms us": Archbishop John Wester Preaches Peace
Catholic peace activists, Catholic Workers, and members of the Dorothy Day Guild gathered at the Church of Our Saviour in Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday, March 4 to pray for the end of nuclear weapons. Just a few blocks away from the liturgy, the party states of the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons met at the United Nations for their third meeting since signing the treaty in 2017.
"this mucky, decaying system": Catholic Workers resist and persist
How are you, reader? Really: How are you holding up? We posed this question at the second meeting of the Roundtable advisory board in early February. This group of veteran Catholic Workers has generously agreed to help us stay “grounded” and “on track” as we cover the Catholic Worker movement. (See a list of board members here.) As you might expect, everyone had a story or two to share about how their community is being affected by recent changes in the policies of the U.S. federal government.
no "freakish, heroic, saintly activity"
Today’s Gospel, from Luke’s Sermon on the Plain, is a powerful list of instructions for living the Kingdom of God. Give to everyone who asks of you. By “everyone,” I wonder if Jesus meant to include C, who I walked away from mid-monologue when my patience was wearing thin while delivering church soup kitchen meals to folks on the street. I walked away from C instead of responding to his litany of complaints. What is C asking for that I’m so afraid to give? I wonder.
Book paints the Camden 28 as 'Spiritual Criminals.' But were their actions effective?
"Is There Anything Left of the Catholic Left?" I knew I was going to enjoy Spiritual Criminals: How the Camden 28 Put the Vietnam War on Trial, Michelle Nickerson's rollicking account of Catholics raiding a draft board office in Camden, New Jersey, when I spied that question in its table of contents. Nickerson's book begins with a crash course in "the Catholic Left" as it existed in the 1960s and '70s.
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