Heaven's Daily
Newsletter for January 24, 2025
Last winter I read The Outlier, Kai Bird’s 2021 biography of President Jimmy Carter. Bird is one of our most perceptive interpreters of our chaotic, contradictory republic, and his book makes a convincing case for the moral integrity of Carter’s presidency. He was scrupulously honest with the American people, even when it did not serve him politically, and his strong sense of personal conviction and belief in basic human decency informed his approach to governance.
There were, however, some blind spots. Bird relates how, early in his career, “Carter probably knew that he harbored political ambitions, and so he decided to steer clear of any public association with the burgeoning civil rights movement.” This was evident in the strategic distance he kept from Koinonia Farm, the interracial commune founded by Dr. Clarence Jordan on 440 acres in Americus, Georgia, close to Carter’s home.
Though he respected Jordan and the prophetic work of Koinonia (named, incidentally, for the earliest Christian communities) he never offered his forthright support—not when Americus High School denied admission to children from the farm, a decision that was struck down by a federal district court, not when the farm was subjected to ongoing acts of terrorist violence throughout the 1950s. One of these acts, a drive-by shooting, nearly took the life of a visitor named Dorothy Day who was helping to stand guard at Koinonia in 1957.
Two decades later, there was still a feeling of hurt among the Koinonia community for Carter’s silence. “I’ve never met him, and we’ve been living down the road for thirty-four years,” Jordan’s wife, Florence, remarked to a journalist in 1976. “People came here from all over the world, but he hasn’t come seven miles.”
“[H]is absence from the civil rights struggle in South Georgia left the door open for him to play a role on a grander stage years later,” Bird writes by way of explanation, if not exoneration, for this uncharacteristic breakdown of Carter’s moral compass. It got me thinking about how we often do the same thing: there is always some distant, “better” moment to do good, some tradeoff we can make now to have more opportune conditions later.
It got me thinking, too, about the temptation of waiting for the “grander stage,” as if the circumstances of our lives were somehow not enough, as if we knew better than God the proper proportions of our actions and the right use of our gifts. It strikes me that the “grander stage” for us is the backstage for God—or, to develop the metaphor further, that our front-page headlines are fine print for God, and that the stories we discard as small and inconsequential are the featured items in heaven’s daily.
This is not meant to disparage Carter’s otherwise exemplary life in public service, which we celebrate this month. But it is to show that there are different tacks to doing good, and that, in this current moment, we no longer have the option of strategic silence. We must double down on our good works, giving prodigiously and extravagantly without counting the cost, if we are to dismantle our “culture of contempt.”
The stories we share this week—of Christian pacifists quietly saving lives, of prophets sacrificing their political standing to expose some deeper truth, of monks safeguarding the treasures of a culture—show how we, too, can guard the deposit of our goodness in a world that seeks to strip it at every turn. Like them, like Jordan at Koinonia or Carter sheltering the unhoused well into his nineties, we might help author the hidden history of works of mercy that holds our society together.
Michael Centore
Editor, Today's American Catholic