Patrick Jordan is the managing editor of Commonweal, having joined the staff in 1984. He is a former managing editor of the Catholic Worker, a Vietnam-era draft resister, attended the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley, and for seven years worked with terminal cancer patients. With Paul Baumann, he edited Commonweal Confronts the Century (Touchstone, 1999), and is the editor of Dorothy Day: Writings from Commonweal (Liturgical Press). He and his wife Kathleen live on Staten Island. They have two adult children, Hannah and Justin.
“When Dorothy died on November 29, 1980, at the age of
eighty-three, historian David J. O’Brien described her as “the most significant, interesting, and influential person in the history of Catholicism.” It was a bold evaluation for a historian so close to the events and to the death of the person in question. Yet it remains perhaps the most perceptive, succinct, and often-quoted summation of Day’s long and eventful life. That O’Brien’s appraisal appeared in the pages of Commonweal was fitting. Considered one of North America’s premier Catholic publications since its founding in 1924, the independent lay Catholic journal of opinion played a 
pivotal role not only in the history of twentieth-century American Catholicism but in Day’s personal and professional lives. Commonweal printed a broad range of her work over a span of nearly half a century (from the time of her conversion in the late 1920’s through the mid-1970s)…The radical (that is, “back to the roots”) Catholic Worker movement tapped into the core of the Christian gospel with a remarkable zest, applying the spirit of the New Testament to the social issues of the time, as well as to the quotidian concerns of family, work, prayer, and community.” From the Introduction of Dorothy Day: Writings from Commonweal
This event is co-sponsored by the Commonweal College Speakers Program which is made possible thanks to a generous gift from James H. Duffy.
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