Michael D. O'Brien

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Michael D. O'Brien (b. 1948) is a Roman Catholic author, artist, and frequent essayist and lecturer on faith and culture, living in Combermere, Ontario, Canada. Born in Ottawa, he is self-taught, without an academic background.

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[edit] Fiction

Michael O'Brien is best known for his series of apocalyptic novels collectively entitled Children of the Last Days. The best-selling first novel in the series, Father Elijah: An Apocalypse (Ignatius Press, 1996), tells the story of a Jewish Holocaust survivor named David Schäfer who converts to Catholicism, becomes a Carmelite priest, and takes the name Father Elijah. The novel includes depictions of a prefect for the Congregation of the Faith and a Pope, who resemble Cardinal Ratzinger and Pope John Paul II. The fictional pope tasks Father Elijah with a secret mission: to confront the Antichrist, bring him to repentance, and thus postpone the Great Tribulation. One of the Antichrist's intrigues involves the discovery of Aristotle's lost work On Justice.

O'Brien's other fiction works include:

  • The Small Angel (1996)
  • Strangers and Sojourners (1997) an agnostic Englishwoman and Catholic Irishman both flee from their pasts to Canada in the 1930s, where they live out their lives as "Strangers and Sojourners in a foreign land..."
  • Eclipse of the Sun (1998) a children of the last days novel; a priest and a child are hunted across NW Canada by the forces of evil.
  • Plague Journal (1999) This is another CHILDREN OF THE LAST DAYS novel, set in Canada; it is written in the form of the diary of a Catholic newsletter editor who is framed for murder by the forces of Antichrist.
  • A Cry of Stone (2003)
  • Sophia House (2005) Depicts the experiences of the young David Schafer/Fr. Elijah while being sheltered by Polish Catholic during the Second World War.
  • Island of the World (2007)

The themes presented in O'Brien's "Children of the Last Days" series are strikingly similar to those presented in Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World, a Catholic apocalyptic novel written in 1907.

[edit] Non-fiction

Michael O'Brien's articles and lectures tend to focus on his belief that Western civilization is in severe decline as well as heading towards a "New Totalitarianism."

O'Brien's best-known non-fiction work, A Landscape with Dragons: The Battle for Your Child's Mind (Ignatius Press, 1994) — described as controversial by its publisher — presents his concern that contemporary children's literature and culture has strayed from Christian ethics to a more pagan ideology where good and evil is not strongly defined.[1] [2]The book features O'Brien's criticism of fantasy works ranging from C. S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia and J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings to Anne McCaffrey's Dragonriders of Pern. (About one third of this 260-page book is a bibliography of recommended reading which was not penned by O'Brien.) One of the book's central claims is that any story in which dragons are presented sympathetically (rather than as forces of evil) is implicitly anti-Christian (because of the traditional use of the dragon as a symbol for Satan). This has been criticised as simplistic (for example, the red dragon used as the national symbol of Wales is clearly not satanic).

O'Brien's other non-fiction works include:

  • Nazareth Journal magazine (he was founding editor and frequent contributor)
  • The Family and the New Totalitarianism (essay collection)
  • The Mysteries of the Most Holy Rosary (meditations and paintings)

[edit] Art

O'Brien is also an artist, painting in a neo-Byzantine style with a contemporary interpretation; his paintings often sell for upwards of $10,000 USD. (His paintings are featured on the covers of all of his books.)

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Advertisement for Landscape with Dragons Ignatius.com. Retrieved June 6, 2006.
  2. ^ Just a Fairy Story? excerpt from Chapter 2 of A Landscape with Dragons: The Battle for Your Child's Mind.

[edit] External links