Hostname: page-component-7c8c6479df-94d59 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-03-27T21:16:33.323Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

American Catholics and Emptiness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 May 2016

Extract

As I read Corrigan's book over the last few months, I encountered it on several occasions with an acute sense of displacement. The margins of my copy are filled with notes reflecting the strange feelings that come from reading a book about emptiness on the #1 train between 225th Street and 66th Street in New York. Each day, as my fellow subway riders and I jam aboard the increasingly-crowded train, we struggle to settle ourselves in acceptable spots; eventually and inevitably this means our bodies find an uneasy peace in a space directly touching those alongside us—legs bumping legs, shoulders touching shoulders, arms along arms. At some points along the journey, this fragile détente of human bodies is prone to crumble; would-be riders barrel aboard, leveraging themselves inside despite slamming subway doors, loud indecipherable admonitions over the P.A., and the muttered protests of those already occupying some portion of the space the newcomers need. For a few weeks I took this trip with Emptiness in tow and I marveled, huddling in my designated square feet and leaning over the book on my lap, as the men, women, and children of New York's west side struggled to find just enough emptiness to enable them to get to work.

Type
Forum
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

8 Corrigan, Emptiness, 18.

9 Ibid., 6.

10 Ibid., 173–174.

11 Harold Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware (New York: Stone and Kimball, 1896).

12 Ibid., 361.

13 Corrigan, Emptiness, 20.

14 Ibid., 22.

15 Third Plenary Council of Baltimore (1895), Baltimore Catechism 2 (Charlotte, N.C.: TAN Books, 2010) 18–22.

16 Corrigan, Emptiness, 55–56.

17 Dorothy Day, The Long Loneliness: The Autobiography of the Legendary Catholic Social Activist (New York: Harper One, 2009 [1952]), 138.

18 James T. Fisher, The Catholic Counterculture in America, 1933–1962 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2001); Jack Lee Downey, The Bread of the Strong: Lacouturisme and the Folly of the Cross, 1910–1985 (New York: Fordham University, 2015).