All the Way In: A Story of Activism, Incarceration, and Organic Farming by Jeanne Clark (review)

Reviewed by: All the Way In: A Story of Activism, Incarceration, and Organic Farming by Jeanne Clark Jeffrey Marlett All the Way In: A Story of Activism, Incarceration, and Organic Farming. By Jeanne Clark, OP. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2023. 160pp. 20. 00. In this book, Clark offers a reflective narrative of a life committed to peace and justice. The subtitle catches the broad range of experiences End Page 64 she has had. Born and raised on Long Island, New York, Clark's commitment to social justice took her across the country. Now in her mid-eighties, Clark lives again on Long Island at a community farm she helped found. The book's first-person perspective offers a unique, spiritual view of Reagan-era peace activism, the legacies of many prominent Catholic activists, and the quiet rewards of sustainable agriculture. Clark entered the Dominican convent in 1958, admittedly attracted to the order's emphasis on truth and contemplation. Twenty years later, while on retreat at a Benedictine monastery, a chance encounter with James Douglass's Resistance and Contemplation (1972) galvanized her commitment to pursuing peace activism against nuclear proliferation. Persuading her community to support her vision, Clark moved to Nashville, Tennessee, to live and work with another Dominican activist, Carol Feeney. Committed to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr's legacy, Feeney, with Clark joining her, participated in Clergy and Laity Concerned. After the 1980 assassinations of Archbishop Oscar Romero and then four American Catholic women in El Salvador, Feeney, Clark, and others began protesting nonviolently at the Pentagon. Found guilty on Good Friday for trespassing, Clark served twenty-eight days in a Washington, DC jail. Inspired by Franz Jagerstatter and Seattle archbishop Raymond Hunthausen, in 1983 Clark traveled to Washington state to protest the deployment of Trident submarines. Kneeling in front of the oncoming train led to another arrest and conviction. Clark's nonviolent civil disobedience caused a rift with her father, a New York City police officer. Later in the book Clark details movingly the slow process of dialogue by which her father came to understand, and even approve, of her actions. In 1985 Clark returned to Long Island for new ministerial work with El Salvadoran immigrants and food justice. A trip to a Honduran refugee camp awakened Clark's own yearnings for home. Immersing herself in the works of Thomas Berry, CP, and his colleague, Brian Swimme, Clark began visiting farm communities led by other Catholic women. This led to the founding of Homecoming Farm in 1996. This has become Clark's anchorage for her ministries, including a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) endeavor, and educational outreach to introduce urban populations, especially children, to the joys of connecting to nature through small-scale farming. The consistency of both her spirituality and her praxis appear throughout, even at the end with her comments about Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. End Page 65 Poems and reflections, some by Clark, others by her influencers like James Douglass and Daniel Berrigan, SJ, intersperse this narrative. General readers and study groups will appreciate Clark's brisk and inquisitive style. The account of Jagerstatter's "white train" dream is particularly moving and provided a key impetus for Clark's peace activism. She maintains the dream's motif of a white train delivering death throughout the book. Her later reflections on what she hoped to achieve by such protests, knowing that more trains would come, demonstrates her place alongside Catholic peace activists such as Dorothy Day and Daniel Berrigan and those inspired by their work (107). The book also slyly reveals the extent to which Catholic activism had become a truly national movement by the late 1970s. Clark's protests take her back and forth across the United States and to El Salvador before returning to Long Island, a quintessentially "American Catholic" location. Perhaps the book's most striking feature is what is not present: many elements, customarily considered essential, to the Catholic social justice endeavor such as Vatican II and the Eucharist. These receive no mention at all. Preceding Catholic voices, such as the Catholic Worker (beyond Dorothy Day herself) and the Catholic rural life movement, rarely receive attention, but clearly laid the foundation for. . .