“She Lived as Though the Truth Were True”

The Times has a profile of Jeremy Scahill, activist, author (Blackwater) and now documentary film director (“Dirty Wars,” based on his own book about drone strikes and such). Scahill was raised in a Catholic Worker family: his father, Mike Scahill, lived in the New York City Catholic Worker community in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and it rubbed off on Jeremy, as North Carolina’s Indyweek explained:

At a 1995 Washington, D.C., peace rally, he met the late peace activist Philip Berrigan, who invited him to visit Jonah House, the resistance community Berrigan and his wife, Elizabeth McAlister, founded in inner-city Baltimore. Scahill went to Jonah House for the weekend, but stayed a year. `Look at the incredible education you get from spending a year painting houses on a ladder next to Phil Berrigan. It had a profound impact on me.’

Scahill (his Wikipedia entry reports) takes inspiration from Dorothy Day:

“`I think we all have to remember something that Dan Berrigan, the radical Catholic priest, said about Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement. He said she lived as though the truth were true.”

• 26 June 2013