Michael o'brien snl
- •
On the Edge of Infinity by Clemens Cavallin is a biography on the life and work of Mr. Michael D. O’Brien, whom Our Lady Seat of Wisdom College is honoured to have as our Artist and Writer in Residence. Published in the spring of this year by Justin Press, its author is Clemens Cavallin, Associate Professor in History of Religions at the University of Gothenberg, Sweden, and like his subject matter, is also a painter, husband and father of six.
Book Review Editor of Convivium magazine Richard Bastien ranks the book “ among the great biographies.” He writes: “It is a rare experience to read a biography whose subject comes alive as one turns the pages. Clemens Cavallin brings to this book his gifts as a writer, but also his profound sympathy with his subject, a combination which has given us a work worthy of Michael O’Brien.”
According to a review by apologist Dr. Peter Kreeft, Cavallin “shows, rather than tells us, who and what [Michael O’Brien] is.” Writes Kreeft: “Michael O’Brien is, I believe, the greatest living Catholic novelist, so it is high time someone wrote his biog
- •
Over the past century, most Western countries have produced great Catholic fiction writers. The UK may rightly pride itself on Evelyn Waugh, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, the U.S. on Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor, France on Georges Bernanos and Paul Claudel, Italy on Eugenio Corti, and so forth. Canada appeared until recently to be the unfortunate exception to this rule. But Canadians may perhaps now boast of one Catholic novelist of international repute: Michael O’Brien. At least that is the view of American philosopher Peter Kreeft, whose endorsement of On the Edge of Infinity, the first biography of O’Brien ever published, describes him as “the greatest living Catholic novelist”.
This being said, two things distinguish O’Brien from other Catholic writers. First, he is also a well-known painter, whose works, mainly icons, are found in churches all over North America. Second, his career as a fiction writer was made possible thanks to a relatively small U.S. publisher who, in 1996, readily accepted to publish what became his best-known novel, Father Elijah. The book h
- •
Writer Michael O’Brien and the Mission of Catholic Art
On the Edge of Infinity
A Biography of Michael D. O’Brien
By Clemens Cavallin
Ignatius Press, 2019
300 pages, $18.95
To order: ignatius.com or (800) 651-1531
For secularists, suffering is proof enough that God does not exist; or, if he does exist, he has become indifferent to his creation. At the same time, choosing to suffer seems pointless, even fanatical and self-destructive, ruining the only real life we have to live, in the flesh, here on Earth.
For Michael O’Brien, the 71-year-old Catholic Canadian painter, writer of icons and writer of novels,and works of nonfiction, human suffering is at the heart of his art — a condition to be understood as an alignment with Christ on the cross and his resurrection. It is to see the story of every person as the story of Christ.
As we learn in On the Edge of Infinity, a just-released and welcome biography of Michael O’Brien by Swedish author Clemens Cavallin, the Canadian artist knew from the start that his artistic vocation would be a supreme struggle not only fo
Copyright ©aimbomb.pages.dev 2025