Michael O'Brien (Canadian author)

Michael D. O'Brien (born 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. Michael O'Brien's books have been published in a number of foreign languages, including Croatian, Czech, French, German, Italian, Polish, Spanish, Swedish and Lithuanian.

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 for the Doctrine of the Faith, who resembles Joseph Ratzinger, and a Pope, who resembles 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 themes presented in O'Brien's Children of the Last Days series are similar to those presented in Robert Hugh Benson's Lord of the World, a Catholic apocalyptic novel written in 1907.

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).

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

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 with one recent exception. His latest major work, A Father's Tale, pictures a boy with a large model sailboat and is not attributed to O'Brien or any other artist.

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.

External links

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