How to save a life

While summer is undeniably a time for relaxing, those who choose to lug Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own to the beach will not be disappointed. It is a sweepingly ambitious book: A joint biography of four American Catholics whose lives spanned most of the twentieth century. Yet, Elie succeeds entirely and the book's 500-odd pages are a fascinating analysis of how religion shaped four icons of their respective generations.

Elie follows Dorothy Day, the radical activist and newspaperwoman; Thomas Merton, the monk and memoirist; Walker Percy, the essayist and novelist and Flannery O'Connor, the writer of novels and short stories. He tracks these four prominent Catholics through the turbulent twentieth century as they find their vocations and try to live the lives they believe God is calling them to lead.

While their missteps and misfortunes help keep Elie's subjects human, it is their parallels and intersections that hold the book together. The correspondence between Merton, writing from a Kentucky monastery, and Day, in a New York City tenement, is particularly fascinating. Their letters touch on contemporary issues such as nuclear war and civil rights along with theological issues. What makes their stories compelling is that both believed all these issues to be connected: that war is an affront to the God of life and that when Jesus told us to love our neighbors, he did not mean us to distinguish them by color. Percy and O'Connor, meanwhile, worked out the problems of their age-old faith through their popular fiction.

While Elie's subjects are all deceased, the persistence of issues they struggled with, like racism and war, and the vivacity of their faith, makes their stories relevant and compelling.