‘If You Can Do It, I Can, Too’: Peter Maurin House Shows How Vibrant Community Life Is Possible for All

The more radical demands of the Gospel—love of enemies, unrestricted generosity to the poor—can seem intimidating, even impossible.

That’s especially likely, says Colin Miller, if we try to live out the Gospel as isolated individuals. But if we do it together as part of a deeply rooted Christian community—the kind of community whose members are “strongly and deeply involved in each other’s lives”—then the challenge of discipleship suddenly becomes easier, joyful, life-giving…even “fun.”

Cover photo by Crystal Hambley.

That claim is central to Miller’s new book, We Are Only Saved Together: Living the Revolutionary Vision of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Movement, which served as the starting point for a roundtable discussion that he and his wife, Leigh, led in mid-December at the Winona (Minnesota) Catholic Worker. The book isn’t a history of the movement’s ideas, he said; instead, it’s an invitation for everyday Christians to embrace a Catholic Worker lifestyle, doing works of mercy and justice as part of a strong community.

Although Miller has an academic background—he has a doctorate in theology from Duke University—much of the inspiration for the book comes from his lived experience at two Catholic Worker communities: one that he co-founded in Durham, North Carolina, with fellow Duke University graduate students, and one that he and Leigh co-founded with another couple, Tyler and Crystal Hambley, in Columbia Heights, Minnesota, where they now reside with their four young children.

“It has always been the most exhilarating and compelling way of doing Christianity for me,” he said. He tried teaching at the university level for a couple years, he said, but ended up leaving. “It was revealing to me because there are some people that do a great job of that and are able to find a sort of vitality in Christian life at the level of Christian ideas…but I needed something more. I needed something on the ground.”

Miller grew up in a Twin Cities suburb playing video games and participating in sports; issues of poverty and justice weren’t on his radar. He attended the University of Minnesota, then Yale University, where he picked up a Master of Arts in religion. But it was at Duke University, under the influence of theologian Stanley Hauerwas and a group of unhoused people, that he discovered the Catholic Worker.

The unhoused people had made their home base on a street corner near the Episcopal parish where Miller and several classmates attended morning prayer. Over the course of several months, the students began forming personal, more committed relationships with their unhoused friends. Looking for a theological framework for understanding their experience, they turned to the university’s theology library, where they quickly discovered Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker. That, in turn, led them to investigate the writing of the intellectuals, saints, movements, and ordinary people who informed Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day.

Before long, the group had moved into a house with their formerly unhoused companions. Miller was ordained an Episcopal priest, allowing him to say Mass at the house.

He met Leigh, who was part of another intentional community in Durham, and the two were married in 2014. They moved to Pennsylvania, where Miller briefly taught theology. He continued to investigate the Catholic intellectual tradition, and was received into the Catholic Church in 2016.

The Millers moved back to Minnesota, where Colin Miller took a position with the Church of the Assumption in St. Paul, Minnesota. There, he founded the Center for Catholic Social Thought, an initiative by which Miller educates local Catholics about the Catholic social tradition. He launched a small publication, The Catholic Citizen, and began writing columns for the newspaper of the Archdiocese of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, The Catholic Spirit.

Their friends from Durham, Tyler and Crystal, purchased the home behind theirs. They didn’t intend to start a new Catholic Worker, at least not at first, but “one thing led to another,” as Colin puts it, and before long, they had “accidentally” formed another Catholic Worker community—but on a scale that would be more manageable for two families with fulltime jobs and a bunch of small children.

In 2022, they purchased a third home adjacent to their properties and christened the whole enterprise the Peter Maurin House.

The property is a modest bungalow in a working-class neighborhood in Columbia Heights; a small sign on the front of the property indicates that the chapel is around the back. The community prays together five days a week and gathers with extended community for “open dinners” on Mondays and Fridays, inviting anyone in need of food or fellowship.

“If you ever come for community meals, especially on Fridays, it will not be relaxing and it will not be quiet,” Miller warns. The two resident families have nine young children between them, and on open meal nights, as many as ten more children under the age of twelve are present.

The Miller and Hambley families practice a blend of formal and informal financial interdependence. They collectively funded the purchase of the hospitality house, with one couple holding the mortgage and the other effectively renting from them; both share the costs (and work) of home maintenance. A communal vehicle is available to any member of the community.

Beyond these structured arrangements, they embrace an ethos of mutual generosity—covering each other’s expenses without keeping accounts, sharing financial gifts in times of need, and contributing to the needs of guests.

“We do our best to take care of one another and to make the word ‘mine’ or ‘ours’ less applicable,” Miller wrote in a follow-up email after the roundtable. “This has taken the form of financial gifts from one family to another in tough circumstances (and it has, in fact, gone both directions), or in joint gifts to, or from, guests at the house. And in general, we make it a principle not to keep accounts. We put gas in each others’ cars, or pay for dinner, or pick up groceries, and there’s no ‘I’ll pay you back.’”

Their approach seeks to foster a shared life of trust and solidarity. Recently, they have begun exploring deeper resource-sharing with a broader network of friends, drawing inspiration from the “public household” model practiced by Portland’s Simon Weil House.

Miller describes their setup as a “mom and pop” Catholic Worker. While the Millers are quick to say that their community doesn’t do as much as some other Catholic Worker communities do, the Peter Maurin House may provide a more do-able model for people who want intentional community without the intensity of a larger urban house of hospitality.

“You can read The Long Loneliness and you can think, ‘I’m not going to do what Dorothy did, I can’t do that—I’ve got five kids at home and I’m married,’” Leigh Miller said. Setting the bar too high can reinforce the perception that the more challenging aspects of the Gospel are for people who have received a special call. Keeping things low-key has allowed a wide variety of people to participate in the open dinners or another aspect of their community.

One visitor told her, jokingly, that he “didn’t like” the experience “because if you can do some of this stuff then I have to be able to, too.”

The Millers said they have plenty of friends who do “way more” hospitality than they do; some call themselves Catholic Workers, even though they aren’t listed on the Catholic Worker directory. Others, such as a couple who do Christ room hospitality in their basement, don’t use the Catholic Worker label but are still living out the essential principles of the movement.

The idea that being part of an intentional community committed to living out the Gospel isn’t a niche thing, but a calling for all Christians, has been central to Colin Miller’s work across the various hats he wears. The Catholic Worker offers a living model to show what that kind of radical commitment to the Gospel and community life might look like today, he says.

“The church is just filled with lonely people, and we need things to do together,” Miller said. “Peter and Dorothy’s model is a way of finding truly Christian Catholic things to do together.”

The community aspect of the Catholic Worker program is key, Miller says. While acknowledging the problematic aspects of the pre-conciliar Church, he points to a time when U.S. Catholics formed communities strengthened by financial interdependence, cooperative businesses, shared childcare, neighborhood associations, and other communal structures. He envisions some form of such “deep community” as critical to the revitalization of the Church today.

“One of the reasons I think that the hard sayings of the gospel don’t get a lot of airtime is that we imagine Christianity being something that we do as individuals,” Miller said. “But that’s not what we’re called to. We’re called to voluntary poverty and hospitality to the poor and agronomic universities and all the rest of the stuff as communities. The only reason that I’ve done it and still do it is because it’s so much fun,  because I get to do it with my friends, and I’ve made the best friends of my life doing it. “