The Catholic Worker was founded in 1933 by the journalist Dorothy Day and an immigrant from France, Peter Maurin, in New York City’s Union Square. It was the height of the Great Depression: unemployment and hunger were never far from a worker’s door. The pair started with a newspaper, addressing their first issue to those “who think that there is no hope for the future, no recognition of their plight.” Both hope and recognition could be found, they thought, in the neglected social teaching of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Worker looked to respond to the demands of the gospel through radical social and political action: to “blow the dynamite” of Christian teaching about poverty, community, hospitality, and peace.

Still going strong after nine decades, a radical movement of sharing and caring proves it’s possible to escape and resist capitalism, to a point.