By Mary Jo Leddy, Romero House Founder
I was a little puzzled when Leslie Dolman asked why I had done my thesis on Hannah Arendt.
I knew Leslie had been an engineer and had given her many gifts to the work of Romero House as a volunteer.
But I wondered how or why she had noticed that I had done a thesis on one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century.
I recall answering Leslie’s question: Because Arendt was so thoughtful, so concerned about the realities of the world we live in. I fumbled for an answer.
So I dusted off some of the books I had read when at university. Leslie for her part began to hunt for some of the conferences that were being offered in memory of Hannah Arendt. We had planned a trip to Bard College in the United States. The title of the conference was “Joy: Loving the World in Dark Times”. This was in reference the fact that she had considered titling one of her books “Amor Mundi”.1
For many Arendt scholars, this was an exciting discovery. Her previous writings had explored the realities of the 20th century: The Origins of Totalitarianism, Men in Dark Times, On Revolution, the Banality of Evil.
Amor Mundi was a totally new way of looking at the world. It was joyful, free. I learned in a new and personal way that Arendt herself had been a refugee, had taken Jewish children orphaned by the realities of World War II, over the Mediterranean to life. It was only after many years of freedom that Hannah Arendt learned to love the world, in spite of its problems and difficulties. It was the only world we had.
It was a world worth struggling with and for. Her last book was entitled, the Life of the Mind. It was a world where goodness could be born, as surely as new political movements could be born. Hannah Arendt was not a Christian but she calls every one of us to a new way of being. And it is the fact that babies are continually born, with the possibility of new life, that bears the mystery of Christmas.
Leslie Dolman died as she had lived. Amor Mundi.
Leslie was a long-time volunteer at Romero House. She passed away in 2025.
- To read more on the conference Mary Jo mentions in this article, go to: https://medium.com/amor-mundi/on-joy-loving-the-world-in-dark-times-ca5d75cd7fe2 ↩︎