Paul Elie, on the clashing views of Nature and God held by Dorothy Day and Forster Batterham, the man she considered her common-law husband. This is from his great book The Life You Save May Be Your Own:

She had always been a walker in the city, but during those walks on the beach with Batterham she felt something new and strange: a sudden, strong intuition about the presence of God. She described the feeling at length in her autobiography. Nature, she felt, was evidence of the unity and goodness of created things. The knowledge of nature was the beginning of the knowledge of God. To walk in nature was to walk in God’s creation. But Batterham felt differently: “He loved nature with a sensuous passion, and he loved birds and beasts and children because they were not men.” Nature, pure, lawful, impersonal, was a refuge from society and a reproach to humanity and its ideas, especially its ideas about God.

This quarrel about God’s presence in nature — about “the argument from design,” as theologians call it — was the first of their disagreements.