Peter Maurin, Traditionalist

...[H]e read much history, especially histories of the Church.  He read history not to use it as the predictive instrument of the "social scientist," or to whet some pet theory as to why one thing and not another had happened.  Rather, he read history because through it he could discern the workings of those large ideas that had, at one time or another, won the minds and spirits of humankind.  In history, he could see the relationship between an idea-climate and a culture.  History, too, as he saw it, was the catalyst of tradition, the tool by which tradition can be humanized.  It was also the agency of community.  For, as a traditionalist, he affirmed that if the human vision was to be kept clear, the past must not be disassociated from the present.  All that had been possessed an organic unity with the present.  The past was not a carcass to be picked over and then cast onto the refuse pile.--William D. Miller, Dorothy Day: A Biography, pg. 234-235.