We’re excited to introduce Renée Darline Roden as the second Jesuit Media Lab fellow. (Our inaugural fellow, Michael O’Connell, will continue to serve in the role as well. We’re doubling our fellow count!)
Renée is a journalist, playwright, author and theatre teacher who lives in a Catholic Worker community in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. For the JML, Reneé has led our popular Advent and Lent Zoom theatre retreats (which she wrote about for America Magazine), she taught our first playwriting workshop course, and she has written fantastic essays for the website. She also helped lead our first in-person theatre experience, gathering a group in New York City for a performance of “Angel in the Ashes,” a play adapted and directed by JML chaplain Fr. George Drance, SJ.
As a JML fellow, Renée will continue teaching and writing for the site. She’s also developing an exciting new project and will help us think strategically about ways the JML can keep growing and doing cool stuff.
Get to know more about her by reading this Q&A!
—Mike Jordan Laskey
JML: So what’s your deal?
I’m Renée, hailing from Eden Prairie, Minnesota. I haven’t lived in Minnesota for nearly two decades, but that didn’t stop me from recently casting a vote for a new state flag. (They did not choose my candidate.)
I went to the University of Notre Dame, where I studied theatre and theology. The first Jesuit I met was Brian Daley, SJ, whose class on Marian theology I took my senior year at Notre Dame. Shortly after, I spent two years at Cristo Rey New York as part of their post-graduate volunteer program.
Teaching convinced me that studying full time was the best job you could ever get, so I went back to the University of Notre Dame for a MTS in systematic theology. I focused my studies on Hans Urs Von Balthasar, and, separately, on the theology of place.
Studying full time may be the best job ever, but it took me a few years to discover that the mode in which I wanted to be a full-time student of the world was journalism. I spent the pandemic applying for and then attending Columbia University’s School of Journalism. Although not the best financial decision I have ever made, it was the best decision I could have made in terms of community. Who’s drawn to study journalism when the industry is, by all accounts, on its last gasp? The most curious, crazy people who you’ve ever met dissecting sentences to death — the theatre kid to journalist pipeline is real.
You live at and help to run a Catholic Worker house in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. How did you get involved in the Worker movement? And how do the legacies of CW founders Dorothy Day and Peter Maurin inform your creative life?
I heard Dorothy Day’s name a lot at Notre Dame — there’s even a conference room I would study in, watched over by Bob Fitch’s famous portrait of her facing down police officers in the middle of a field during a United Farm Workers’ protest in 1973. I occasionally volunteered at Our Lady of the Road, a drop-in center run by a Catholic Worker community in South Bend, but, although I understood that the Catholic Worker had a vision that transcended volunteerism and soup kitchens, I never encountered it.
While working at the Diocese of Brooklyn, I was asked to review John Loughery and Blythe Randolph’s 2019 biography of Dorothy Day. Reading the story of Day’s life in the lead-up to the 2020 election, a moment where partisan politics felt like life or death, I was gobsmacked by the revelation that this young radical had never cast a vote. She had been imprisoned marching for women’s suffrage but never voted. I had to know more.
I wrote a story about the New York Catholic Worker’s political identity during the 2020 election for a reporting class at Columbia, and eventually for the revealer.
Reading Peter Maurin’s “Easy Essays” and Lincoln Rice’s 2020 annotation of them (“The Forgotten Radical Peter Maurin,” Fordham University Press) convinced me that the philosophy of the Catholic Worker wasn’t just for the brave or the saintly but was for anyone — including me.
Ultimately, the way of life that the Catholic Worker espouses makes a creative life — in all aspects — possible. Peter Maurin spoke of Catholic Worker houses as a place where workers become scholars and scholars become workers.
Voluntary poverty, as contradictory as it sounds, builds community — you rely on others, an unexpected guest, stranger or benefactor arrives with what you need or wisdom you needed to hear instead. Voluntary poverty makes you creative. If you can’t just whip out a credit card to get what you need, how are you going to get it? In theory, you’ll pray a lot more. As many homeless people have reminded me: God takes care of us. Voluntary poverty is also a constant challenge to empty yourself. That sort of kenotic disposition — which I’m still working on — is very fruitful creatively. It stretches your imagination.
The Catholic Worker has always drawn artists and craftsmen and women, from all degrees of education. (The first editor to assist Dorothy was also a Columbia Journalism School grad.) The hyper-urban reality of New York City raises a lot of questions about how late capitalism values artistic work and manual labor. What am I working for? Why does the market rate my labor as greater or lesser than another? Is it because of how much the community needs it or how much revenue it generates for an investor? Artists are deeply aware of the value placed on their work by markets and how those markets value that work in comparison to tech work or real estate.
The Catholic Worker’s philosophy of work, of the dignity that all work has, that we work because we are bursting at the seams with creativity, and that dignity is most fully realized when we own our own work, deeply resonated with me. A place like the Catholic Worker, that eschews a social economy that tells us, as Pope Francis said, the human’s “worth appears increasingly to depend on what they can accumulate with the power of money,” naturally appealed to me.
You have a book coming out soon. What’s that about?
It’s a short biography of a place I met during graduate studies and I have been haunted by ever since: Tantur Ecumenical Institute. Tantur was built in the Seam Zone between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, contentious international territory, with the mission to foster unity. A tall order.
Tantur was commissioned by Pope Paul VI in 1965. Fr. Ted Hesburgh, CSC, at the time the president of the University of Notre Dame, led the efforts to get the institute built, open and hosting scholars of all Christian denominations who came to study together, live together and pray together, in the name of Christian unity.
Although it’s not an institute most Christians have heard of, some theologians hailed Tantur as one of the most important fruits of the Second Vatican Council. Some have described it as more of a failure than a success. Not everyone agrees that’s the case, but I do think the ecumenical movement finds our failures at Christian unity deeply instructive as Christians strive to respond to Christ’s call for us to be united.
The book is a short history of Tantur, its place in the 20th century ecumenical movement, which galvanized Christians to overcome their divisions within history’s bloodiest century, and its delicate political identity as it built bridges with Palestinian Christians and other Christian churches of the Holy Land.
You have led Zoom theatre retreats for the JML (and written about them for America!). What is distinctive about theatre as an art form that might resonate with Ignatian-minded folks?
First of all, you put yourself in the story. This, of course, is a hallmark of Ignatian prayer practice, but its implications reach far beyond lectio divina. Theatre is a practice of empathy; over and over again, you displace your own ego and put your spirit, your body and your life force at the service of telling the story of another person.
Although ego is stereotypically an actor’s affliction, ideally, this practice of investing ourselves in others’ stories, combined with some spiritual grounding, could cultivate Ignatian indifference. We become less attached to the contingencies and accidentals of what we might place our value in — health, wealth, status — noting how they are set down or picked up to embody a variety of characters without affecting our own souls or diminishing our own dignities.
Also, in a world in which we spend thousands of hours a year interacting with the world mostly through our eyeballs — including art — it is very different to tell a story with our other senses. Acting is speaking, not reading. The audience is named for their primary function: audial, to listen to the words being spoken. All of our senses are heightened in a theatre and on stage.
You are a freelance journalist, too. What do you like about journalism? How is it similar to and/or different from playwriting?
I think journalism is an amplification of the idea I spoke about: that your words and your vitality can be given in the service to a story that is not yours and may have nothing to do with you, but is deeply worthy of being told.
Playwriting can feel like journalism in that the world you create is out of your control — in the hands of other actors, directors, designers, it’s not a novel sitting contained on the page. Ideas come from other imaginations and become part and parcel of the final piece. Both require a high capacity for social interaction. Both require a high tolerance for rejection — wooing sources can be tough going, but it’s nothing compared to the gamut of auditions actors run through and applications playwrights send out.
Although playwriting is, ultimately, a story you “just made up,” I think it teaches you the generosity that journalism requires. Playwriting feels political, because it’s a group of people staking a lot on this piece of art working out, and it teaches you to have a lot of respect for the other people who you need to make a story.
But ultimately, journalism is a more delicate endeavor. What you owe to your sources feels more sacred, because it’s their stories you’re setting out to tell, something on loan to you rather than something you own.
As a journalist, you went over to Rome for the conclave and the election of Pope Leo. What is one moment or experience from that reporting trip you know you’ll remember as long as your memory works?
To be clear, I’m not some ultramontane Catholic. Let’s hold the heroes of our hierarchy lightly, I say, given the staggering amount of stories about sex scandals or cover ups we’ve collectively suffered through.
But the moment in which a new pope is elected is bursting with the sacred, unrelated to the individual holiness of the men involved. “Where two or three are gathered in my name” rings true.In the square, the eruption of joy when the white smoke came out continues in an extended moment of exuberance where Chronos melts into Kairos. It feels like time is suspended as we as a Mystical Body of Christ on earth enter a ritual that feels somehow a part of the same moment as when Jesus said to Peter: “Upon this rock I will build my church.” It’s sort of like Eucharist, baptism or washing of the feet: It feels sacred because it is something Christ said to do.
There’s a divinity in the continuity, something profoundly eschatological about knowing what will happen next. We see the future in that present and await for it to unfold: a man will appear on the balcony who will announce the name of the pope, telling us something that is already true, but we do not know it, and it is already real, but will not be fully realized until we all know his name. He is already the pope, but that papacy will not fully begin until we have all seen him as our pope. Then he will walk on the balcony and the rejoicing will start all over again.
I wrote a reflection comparing the moment to a childbirth. It does feel like, before the curtain parts, he is a pope in utero, and when he enters onto the balcony, something new has been born. It feels like other moments where the veil has been peeled back and the sacred supernatural reveals itself in the world.
Again, that’s not a statement about the pope as a person, but really about a God who promised and continues to promise: “Behold I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”
What are some of your favorite things you have read, watched or listened to this year?
The most inspiring piece of theatre I’ve seen all year was a one-act play that I encountered when I participated in a 24-hour theatre festival at a local theatre here in Harrisburg.
We had from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. to write, and one of the playwrights wrote a very simple story about two birds trying to ransack a field of corn and being foiled by a scarecrow. The world-building was immaculate: A slow exposition introducing us to the bird’s-eye view, as it were, establishing the rules of the avian world, and the slow reveal of how their world maps onto ours was delicious.
It was one of those reminders that some of the best-crafted, well-constructed art can begin with your really silly, really simple idea. Occam’s razor but for writers: The most hilarious conceit is not the most complicated; or: Keep it simple stupid.