Dorothy Day has been proposed as a candidate for canonization. If she is declared a saint her diaries will provide something quite unusual -- the opportunity to follow day by day in the footsteps of a holy person. And they will help to show that holiness is not a matter of perfection -- she is utterly honest in confessing her failings. But it also shows that being a saint is really about being a whole human being -- with all the capacity for joy, sorrow, frustration and desire that that implies. And so we also see her watching television, walking on the beach, listening to the opera radio, rejoicing in some glimpse of beauty in the midst of the slums.

OMC: Did Day -- and do others in the movement -- have difficulty finding room in her life for both radicalism and Catholicism? At times, they're likely to be at odds with one another and create some conflict, I imagine.

RE: Dorothy really invented this way of combining traditional faith and a radical attitude toward society. She saw no contradiction. She believed that human beings were created in the image of God, that life was sacred, that how we treated the poor was directly related to our salvation. And so this inspired her to perform traditional works of charity while also setting herself against a civilization based on violence, materialism, and greed. While her stance was quite exceptional 50 years ago, today that is much less the case.

OMC: Tell us a bit about "The Duty of Delight." How did you come to the project?

RE: Dorothy Day's letters and diaries are part of The Catholic Worker collection at the University of Marquette. They were sealed for 25 years after her death. In 2005 the university approached me and asked me to serve as the editor. I had known Dorothy for the past five years of her life and had served as managing editor of the newspaper. I also edited an anthology of her writings and, as editor-in-chief of Orbis Books, had published many books by and about her. This project--which will be followed later by a collection of her letters--involved first transcribing all the contents of her diaries from a period of almost 50 years, and then editing it down a book of reasonable length.

OMC: What was the most rewarding part?

RE: The person who emerges from the diaries is very much the person I knew -- funny, a wonderful storyteller, a great observer of detail. But I was very moved to learn more about her personal struggles, how much she confronted the sense, at times, that her life was just too overwhelming, too full of impossible demands, surrounded by so many hurt and broken people.

She was immensely sensitive to suffering. And yet she disciplined herself to find God in all things and to find reason for rejoicing. The title, "The Duty of Delight," is a phrase she repeated frequently in her diaries. She believed that in a world of so much sorrow we have a responsibility not to add to the burden of others but instead to increase the balance of love.

Many people associate her with her public protests and acts of civil disobedience. But one sees in her diaries that her life was mostly taken up with unremarkable and ordinary activities. She believed that everyday life was the true arena of holiness. Before we try to change the world, we should try to be more kind and forgiving toward the people closest at hand. When you try it, it is harder than you think.

OMC: Finally, what lessons do you think Day's life -- as we can access it through her diaries -- are especially useful to us in 2008?

RE: Like many great saints of the past Dorothy tried to respond faithfully to the challenges of her time in history. She really had to invent her own path. She reminds us that we all face that challenge. In her case, she confronted the problems of the Depression, war, the struggle for racial justice, the Cold War, the problems of revolution, freedom, the rights of conscience and a right relationship to the earth.

These continue to describe some of the challenges of our own time. And I think she continues to offer a challenge to live out the radical implications of the gospel -- not to be content with our own spiritual peace or personal salvation, but to struggle for a future in which God's will is better realized "on earth as it is in heaven."