By John-Henry Westen
WASHINGTON, D.C., April 19, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Dawn Eden, celebrity blogger and Deputy News Editor for regional editions at the New York Daily News, was doing a book signing for her new book “The Thrill of the Chaste” at the National Catholic Prayer Breakfast last week when she sat down with LifeSiteNews.com for an interview.
Her life story as she revealed it in snapshots is a fascinating and captivating chronicle of rebellion.
In the 1990’s as a rock journalist and unobservant Reform Jew, Eden says she thought herself the quintessential subversive, in a lifestyle of sexual liberty amid the excitement of the music world. As Eden puts it, “I was brought up in a fairly secular, Jewish home . . . I did not continue observance after my bat mitzvah and it was not anything that was stressed to me outside of the annual Passover Seder and family get-togethers at holidays.”
“I thought that I was this great rebel,” she related, “because I was writing about rock ‘n roll and having sex with whomever I pleased and I was going to work at my job at Kim’s Video on St. Mark’s Place wearing fishnet hose and vinyl boots.”
Her self-assessment was altered radically when, on the recommendation of a musician she interviewed, she discovered famed Christian author G.K. Chesterton. Eden explains: “Back in December 1995, while doing a phone interview with Ben Eshbach of an L.A. band called the Sugarplastic, I thought I would ask him something more erudite than the usual rock-journalist questions, so I asked what he was reading. He said that he was reading G.K. Chesterton’s ‘The Man Who Was Thursday.’ So, I thought, well, I’ll impress him and I’ll go out and read it. I picked it up, not knowing what I was in for.”
Chesterton, she said, presented the heroes in the book as rebels who “discovered that what they were ultimately searching for was the very thing that they thought they had been rebelling against – God.”
“I saw that Chesterton was presenting Christianity as the ultimate rebellion which was very jarring for me because I had defined myself as being countercultural,” she said.
“This turned my worldview upside down,” Eden went on, “because I had thought that Christians were conformists,” said Eden. “It felt strange for me to have this idea planted in my head that to be Christian was to be creative and subversive.”
Although the seeds of Christianity may have been planted at that time, Eden’s embracing faith did not come to fruition until nearly four years later, in October 1999. “I had a faith experience that changed my views on God, taking me from accepting him as an intellectual proposition to accepting Him personally into my heart. Because I had read the New Testament—and had absorbed all the Chesterton and C.S. Lewis I could find—feeling God’s presence for the first time drew me into faith in Jesus.”
Baptized nondenominationally at a Protestant church, Eden was not eager to adopt Chesterton’s Catholic faith—a family member who was a lapsed Catholic convert warned her it was “unbiblical.” However, her new convictions bore fruit in a manner that began attracting the interest of Catholic blog readers, as she started blogging about being pro-life. “I started to get more vocal about it because I liked being subversive and to me it seemed to me one of the greatest ways to be rebellious was to be pro-life,” Eden told LifeSiteNews.com.
As Eden’s Christian convictions grew and her notoriety from her Dawn Patrol blog publicized it—leading to her granting interviews to such disparate publications as the American Chesterton Society’s Gilbertmagazine and the salacious gossip site Gawker—her then-job as copy editor with the New York Post became tenuous. She was asked by her boss more than once not to mention her job at the Post in interviews if she noted her Christianity.
In addition to her faith, her pro-life convictions also got her into trouble at the Post. “I was copy-editing a story about so-called ‘miracle babies’ as the story called them who had been created through in-vitro fertilization,” she recalled, “and I felt the need to stress the fact that, in this IVF episode described in the story – there was a death.” She added, “The story said that a woman had three embryos emplanted and ‘two took,’ resulting in ‘miracle babies.’ I didn’t think the babies were such miracles if one baby died in order to create them, so I took away the ‘miracle babies’ term. After the phrase ‘two took,’ I added, ‘one died,’ and I noted that embryos are routinely destroyed in the process of in-vitro fertilization.
“I’m not proud of making those changes,” Eden adds. “It was the cowardly thing to do. I should have asked that the editor make them, and if the editor refused, I should have refused the story and risked being fired. As it was, I was so angry after three years of working at the Post and seeing how the newspaper avoided telling readers the facts about life issues, that I tried to slip the changes under the radar.”
The reporter, Susan Edelman, was outraged when the story came out, Eden said. Eden apologized to the editor and was told that she would have to sign a letter taking responsibility for what she did, but she was not fired. At that point, incensed that Eden was retaining her job, Edelman printed up Eden’s blog entries against Planned Parenthood and those calling abortion “murder.” Eden recalls that she prayed for strength during the ordeal and even though not Catholic, she took solace in the story of another media personality and pro-lifer who had suffered for his faith – St. Maximilian Kolbe.
Kolbe, who was killed in Auschwitz, volunteering to take the place of a stranger who was condemned to death, was an inspiration for Eden and she told LifeSiteNews.com she felt that he could hear her from heaven and pray for her. “I talked with him like I would speak with a friend and I asked him if he would pray for me,” she recalled. “As soon as I did that, I felt a sense of calm in the midst of a storm – I had this feeling that no matter what happened to me, I was going to be all right.”
A few days later she was fired—but even then, she felt grace in the midst of all the antagonism directed at her by her employer. “I had been praying that if I was fired that I wouldn’t break down and cry,” she said, “because I cry at the drop of a hat and I didn’t want them to feel vindicated in firing me by thinking ‘Oh, she’s crazy anyway – she broke down.’”
God answered her prayers. “I was very calm as the editor in chief, Col Allan, was firing me and I actually felt that I had to warn him in some way that he was doing something wrong,” she related. “So, when he announced that he was firing me, I said to him, ‘Sir, you are older than I am and you have had more experience in this field than I have and I am sure that from where you are sitting, you are doing the right thing. But, from where I am sitting, it is the wrong thing.’”
“He pushed himself up on his desk,” she recalled, “and his face got red and his forehead tightened, and he shouted at me, ‘You are a liability’ and ordered me out of the office.”
The firing dampened neither her spirits nor her spunk. As she departed the offices of the paper she shouted to a colleague what was to become the front-page headline a few days later. “So, I had to put my stuff in the proverbial cardboard box, and as I was walking out, I shouted to the deputy copy chief the headline for next Sunday’s front page, because I knew that it was the Trump wedding – ‘Milt, for Sunday – ‘The Lady is a Trump.’”
Sure enough, that headline not only graced the front-page of the New York Post marking the Donald Trump wedding but was also reproduced as far afield as the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia.
The day after her ouster from the Post she was approached by George Gurley, a reporter from a smaller New York newspaper well-read by the city’s media folk, the Observer. “He didn’t know about my firing,” she recalled, “but he . . . said he wanted a story on me because I was a right-wing Christian at the New York Post.”
Quick as ever, Eden replied, “Well, I’ve got a better story for you than that because I am the one who got fired from the New York Post for being a right-wing Christian.” Soon the news of her being fired from the Post was on the front page of the Observer.
The editor of the Post’s major rival The New York Daily News saw the Observer story and that resulted in Eden’s current employment with the Daily News—presumably for her headline skills rather than her political stances, since the News’ editorial page is resolutely pro-choice.
It was also through the firing, Eden told LifeSiteNews.com, that “W Publishing Group got in touch with me and asked me if I would like to write a book and I suggested ‘Thrill of the Chaste’.”
Eden went from believing she would never again be able to work in journalism again to having a major new job and a book deal. Shortly thereafter she entered the Catholic Church believing God had answered her prayers in a miraculous way and that, as she puts it “I felt that St. Maximilian was praying for me.”
She started inquiring into Catholicism, she said, just after her being fired. “I realized that if I am going to be taking a hit for life, I might as well be with the Church that has been taking hits for life for 2000 years – you can quote me on that,” she told LifeSiteNews.com.
Her Christianity has not diminished her fondness for rebellion and being subversive. “Just a couple of nights ago,” she reminisced with a mischievous smile, “I went to an alumni/student roundtable at NYU and some of the people at the roundtable were media people – one of them was a reporter for Newsweek.” The Newsweek reporter asked her what she wrote about on her blog, to which Eden replied, “Well, I write about my faith and values and chastity and about pro-life issues – that is very important to me.”
Explains Eden, “Of course, to a Newsweek reporter or to your average NYU student, it’s probably like saying, ‘I write about killing small children and boiling them.’ Because that is how they think of it. Poor analogy, I know, since it’s abortion that kills children, but pro-choicers have that same kind of revulsion to hearing someone say they’re pro-life, that you and I do when hearing someone say they’re pro-choice. So, it was kind of funny to see how these people’s expressions very carefully didn’t change when I said that.”
Dawn Eden’s book The Thrill of the Chaste is available from Amazon here:
https://www.amazon.com/Thrill-Chaste-Finding-Fulfillment-Keeping/dp/084991311X
See her Dawn Patrol Blog here:
https://www.dawneden.com/blogger.html