NFR!
by Lana Del Rey

Lizzy Grant, FCRH ’08, is better known as Lana Del Rey, her professional moniker as a singer, songwriter, and musician. Del Rey’s sixth album, Norman _______ Rockwell! was released in August 2019 to wide critical acclaim, with The Guardian, NPR, Pitchfork, and others naming it the best album of the year. The record is both personal and outward- looking. Del Rey describes intimate relationships and the increasingly precarious state of the world with the same biting wit and cool, deadpan vocal delivery, all over some of the most lush and intricate melodies she’s ever written. While her early work was sometimes described as “detached” or “ironic,” on NFR! the listener is plugged in to the funny, profound observations of an artist watching the world around her warp at high speed. As she croons on album highlight “The greatest,” “If this is it, I’m signing off … I hope the livestream’s almost on.” —Adam Kaufman

The Hunt
starring Betty Gilpin, FCLC ’08

Fordham Theatre alumna Betty Gilpin has had a big couple of years, earning Emmy nominations in 2018 and 2019 for her role as wrestler Liberty Belle in the Netflix series GLOW. But in The Hunt, she takes on what may be her biggest role yet. The film, described by its director and producers as a satire of the left-versus-right divide in American politics, sees Gilpin play Crystal Creasey, one among a group of captives who are kidnapped and hunted for sport. The film attracted a good deal of controversy, and its release was delayed in the wake of mass shootings in Dayton and El Paso, but it is now available on streaming services after a theatrical release in March. “It’s supposed to be a movie that you can [watch with]your family member who you can’t make eye contact with at Thanksgiving and you … laugh at each other and laugh at yourselves,” Gilpin recently told The New York Times. Katie Walsh of Tribune News Service wrote that the movie “is worth the price of admission for [Gilpin’s] performance alone,” and Vulture’s Alison Willmore wrote that Gilpin plays Crystal “with the kind of delectably unflappable timing ’80s action franchises were once built on.” —Adam Kaufman

Dorothy Day: Dissenting Voice of the American Century
by Blythe Randolph and John Loughery, FCRH ’75

In his last book, John Loughery focused on Fordham’s founder, Archbishop John Hughes, a key figure in 19th-century U.S. history and tireless advocate for struggling Irish immigrants. In his latest book, co-written with Randolph, he chronicles the life of Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker movement, outspoken pacifist and advocate for the poor, and critic of institutions both left and right. Judging by the reviews, Randolph and Loughery have provided the definitive biography. Writing in The New York Times, Karen Armstrong called it “precise and meticulous” and a “vivid account of her political and religious development.” The authors have revived a “voice for our times,” Samantha Power wrote in The Washington Post, noting Dorothy Day’s stances that have modern-day resonance—her attacks on corporate influence on public policy, her advocacy on behalf of refugees, and her “suspicions of an overzealous federal bureaucracy,” among others. —Chris Gosier

It’s a sentiment that Nina Heyden, FCRH ’17, holds dear. Currently on a Fulbright fellowship at the University of Essex in the United Kingdom, she’s pursuing a Master of Science in Applied Economics and Data Analysis. She’s taking complex information, often big data, and boiling it down into digestible graphics, charts, and other discernible ways that visually convey what the numbers mean.

At Fordham, Heyden studied math and economics, where she got a foundation in econometrics and data analysis for work that she is continuing to do at Essex. Throughout her schooling, she said, she has set out to demystify complex economic concepts through visualization. As an undergraduate, she created interactive graphics to showcase the data behind the plight of the world’s migrant population.

“I am interested in social science research because it can influence policy and can affect the lives of a great number of people,” she said. “A visualization component is very important to explain trends to the general public and to policymakers in a clear and concise way. That’s why I find data visualization so compelling.”

Heyden said she learned about merging social justice with her academic strengths through Fordham’s Urban Plunge and the Dorothy Day Center for Service and Justice programs. She was also influenced aesthetically by her father, an architect, and her grandmother, a tapestry weaver.

“It concerns me to hear the statements that people make misinterpreting data on immigration, or not understanding the facts,” she said. “One thing that comes to mind is that there’s a lot of data that show that immigration can benefit a nation’s economy.”

Heyden began her examination of refugee and migrant populations by using data from the United Nations. At the University of Essex, she has access to the UK Data Archive, which holds one of the world’s largest collections of social and economic data. The longitudinal data, in particular, enables her to analyze trends using the same variables across time, “and often over several decades,” she said.

In the United Kingdom, as in the United States, anti-immigrant sentiment contributed to the nation’s election outcome of 2016. A study published in the British Journal of Social Psychology found that anti-immigrant prejudice played a major role in support for Brexit. To provide evidence to the Migration Advisory Committee, Heyden will be joining several economists in London to investigate how immigration impacts the U.K. economy, she said. The data will help inform policy within the context of Brexit.

Among the questions the group will be asking are: How does immigration impact productivity? And, does an increase in low-skilled workers encourage native workers to seek training and move into less physical, more communication- or cognitive-intensive occupations?

“Consensus from economic literature is that immigration is a net benefit to developed countries such as the United Kingdom and the United States,” she said. “In short, immigrants increase labor supply in addition to labor demand, and the U.K. labor market is flexible, adjusting quickly to shocks. Beyond integrating into the labor market, immigrants help to reduce the U.K. budget deficit by contributing more in taxes than they use in welfare and benefits.”

She reiterates that the truth is in the numbers.

“I’m interested in statistics because it can provide concrete answers to these problems that seem overwhelming,” she said. “And that brings me back to data visualization, because you can see the data clearly for yourself.”

Since her death in 1980, many people have hoped to see Day canonized as a saint, recognizing her lifelong commitment to helping the poor, fighting for workers’ rights, and opposing war.

For Kate Hennessy, the youngest of Day’s nine grandchildren, Dorothy Day was indeed an inspiring figure of goodness. But she was also “Granny,” a very real person in her life.

A prolific writer herself, Hennessy has shed light on this personal side of her grandmother in a book titled Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty (Scribner, 2017).

She shared her recollections of Day with the Fordham community in a reading and book signing on March 28 at the Rose Hill campus. The portrait she presented was of a woman who continually gave of what she had to others.

“My grandmother was extraordinarily non-material,” she said. “People were always giving her gifts and she would immediately hand them off to someone else. It was just a kind of instinctive gesture.”

Before a capacity audience, Hennessy said she was motivated to write the book to help people understand Day as a mother, grandmother, and a member of both her own family and the Catholic Worker family.

“If we lose that part of her story it would really be a tragedy. It puts her in the context of a whole human life and doesn’t elevate her or simplify her,” she said.

For Hennessy, the book is as much a portrait of Day as it is a portrait of Hennessy’s mother, Tamar, who played an integral role in the course of Day’s life.

“After all,” she said, “it was the conception of my mother that started my grandmother on her path of Catholicism.” It had been Day’s joy in her pregnancy that had awakened her spiritual longing and her desire to have Tamar baptized. Soon after, Day joined the Catholic Church.

Though Hennessy portrayed her mother and grandmother as two very different women, she said they were ultimately bound by a profound love for each other and by a shared belief in one’s personal responsibility to care for others.

“Both of them deeply believed every single person has a vocation and it is so important to figure out what it is,” she said. “What are your skills? What do you have to give? Where are you drawn to?”

In reading from her book, Hennessy brought to life her teenage visits to see Day at Maryhouse, one of the Catholic Worker “houses of hospitality” that still operates on 3rd Street in Manhattan. She depicted a place of congenial activity and ringing phones, with Day at its center, peaceful in the simple room where she lived, surrounded by her beloved books.

Hennessy said she believes it’s important that each new generation reexamine the life of her grandmother for guidance in how we can respond to the continued problems of poverty, injustice, and hopelessness.

“I certainly wrote this book with every intention of trying to change people’s lives,” she said. “The story of Dorothy Day will change your life if you pay attention to it.”

Day’s legacy continues in Fordham’s Dorothy Day Center for Service and Justice, which connects students to justice-related community service opportunities. The center co-sponsored Hennessy’s reading together with the Francis and Ann Curran Center for American Catholic Studies.

For Roxanne De La Torre, the director of the Dorothy Day Center, learning more about Day’s life helps us to understand that “holiness, goodness, and discovering beauty through all of life’s ups and downs is all a part of this glorious mystery.”

“Hopefully our students can understand that it’s not out of their reach to live a good, blessed life—a life of vocation and direction,” she said.

Hennessy’s previous book, a collaboration with the photographer Vivian Cherry titled Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker: The Miracle of Our Continuance, was published by Fordham University Press in 2016.

–Nina Heidig

Almost immediately, he said, the office received a flood of inquiries from members of the Fordham community looking for ways to help.

“At that point, we didn’t really have trips set up or even damage assessments of what was needed. We just had this list filled with names of people who were ready to give their time and energy. That moved me,” he said.

The Miami native soon found himself back on the Atlantic coast as one of the many Fordham volunteers who alternately delivered food, clothes, and supplies to the Kingsbridge Armory, and who boarded buses bound for Breezy Point, Queens, and other afflicted areas.

Organized by Fordham’s Campus Ministry Office and the Dorothy Day Center for Service and Justice, more than 400 students, alumni, and employees got involved in volunteering regularly. The University has sponsored more than a dozen Sandy Saturdays, each trip attracting between 30 and 70 volunteers. Often times, the organizers had to turn students away.

The biweekly trips, ongoing since the hurricane hit, are an effort by the Fordham community to help rebuild the stricken communities not just through one volunteer day, but through a sustained relationship with Sandy survivors.

Last fall, Jillian Abbale, FCRH ’13, an international political economy major, began immediately to cultivate a working relationship through the Dorothy Day Center with Habitat for Humanity-Westchester to partner on rebuilding projects.

“For me, it was foundational,” she said. “Being able to offer Habitat a guaranteed number of volunteers made us reliable; it meant if they had a big project, Fordham could do it.”

Next, university publicity and recruitment efforts attracted students to the volunteer Saturdays. Moved by a friend’s volunteerism, Dan Mullen, a Fordham College at Lincoln Center junior, went on Sandy Saturday twice, once to Breezy Point, Queens, and again to Brighton Beach’s Guardian Angel Parish, where he cleared away uprooted trees.

“It was eye-opening to see a house with its side completely torn off, dishes still on the table,” he said. “And to realize that, even though we had been safe, others had their lives upended.”

Martinez, who made the volunteer trips several times, recalled gutting a house owned by a retired teacher and disposing of her books and furniture. “It was a very emotional experience, for her and for us.”

And Vicki Gruta, a Fordham College at Rose Hill junior, donned hazmat gear to help clean away beach debris.

Gil Severiano, a Campus Ministry administrator and herself a volunteer, said that, unlike many other metropolitan-area universities, Fordham’s efforts are “committed to being out there long-term.”

“This project is open-ended.”

-Janet Sassi, Patrick Verel