Personalists in practice

Katie van Schaijik | May 2, 2013

Since member Quinton mentioned recently on the Member Feed that he's been wondering what personalism would look like in practice, I've been wanting to launch a section profiling people who have done it.  

I have in mind people like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Jean Vanier; Maria Montessori, and Suzuki—people who have used the insights of Christian personalism in a pioneering way, dramatically influencing culture and society.  

I see that the NCR today has a profile on Dorothy Day, called, "Catholic Worker Celebrates 80 Years of Gentle Personalism."  The phrase comes from her longtime intellectual and spiritual mentor, Peter Maurin, who spoke of "the gentle personalism of traditional Catholicism."  It's the Tradition re-thought, in response to the particular challenges of our day.  Their kind of personalism was less a school of thought than an approach to life—but one that drew deliberately on the insights of the thinkers.

We have a quote of his in our rotation:

We need round-table discussions to keep trained minds from becoming academic. We need round-table discussions to keep untrained minds from becoming superficial. We need round-table discussions to learn from scholars how things would be, if they were as they should be. We need round-table discussions to learn from scholars how a path can be made from things as they are to things as they should be.

Profiling these great personalist "doers" will be a long term project for us.  Meanwhile, if anyone has suggestions for who ought to be included on the list, please do pass them along!