Posts by Zach Kincaid
Jacques Ellul
Jacques Ellul adhered to the maxim “think globally, act locally” throughout his life. He often said that he was born in Bordeaux by chance on January 6, 1912, but that it was by choice that he spent almost all his academic career there. After a long illness, he died on May 19, 1994, in his…
Read MoreMarshall McLuhan
McLuhan was still a twenty-year old undergraduate at the University of Manitoba, in western Canada, in the dirty thirties, when he wrote in his diary that he would never become an academic. He was learning in spite of his professors, but he would become a professor of English in spite of himself. After Manitoba, graduate work…
Read MoreMary Teresa Bojaxhiu
This luminous messenger of God’s love was born on 26 August 1910 in Skopje, a city situated at the crossroads of Balkan history. The youngest of the children born to Nikola and Drana Bojaxhiu, she was baptised Gonxha Agnes, received her First Communion at the age of five and a half and was confirmed in…
Read MoreSimone Weil
Susan Sontag called her “one of the most uncompromising and troubling witnesses to the modern travail of the spirit”, TS Eliot a “genius akin to that of the saints.” One hundred years after her birth, Simone Weil remains a conundrum: her work for the French resistance and writings on the needs of mankind sit alongside hints of…
Read MoreDietrich Bonhoeffer
Bonhoeffer was born in 1906, son of a professor of psychiatry and neurology at the University of Berlin. He was an outstanding student, and at the age of 25 became a lecturer in systematic theology at the same University. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Bonhoeffer became a leading spokesman for the Confessing Church,…
Read MoreMalcolm Muggeridge
Malcolm Muggeridge, a prolific British journalist and caustic social critic, died yesterday in a nursing home in Sussex, England. He was 87 years old. His lawyer, Vernor Miles, said Mr. Muggeridge had never fully recovered from a stroke he suffered three years ago. Possessing an impeccable prose style and an unerring sense of the absurd,…
Read MoreKarl Rahner
One of the most important theologians of the 20th century, Karl Rahner was born in March 1904. He was the fourth of seven children, the son of a local college professor and a devout Christian mother. In 1922 Karl followed his older brother Hugo and entered the Jesuit community. As a Jesuit novice Rahner was…
Read MoreKyrillos VI
On March 9, the Coptic Orthodox Church remembers the departure of the Great Pope (Papa, Ava) Kyrillos (Cyril) VI, the 116th Pope of Alexandria and successor of Saint Mark the Evangelist. He sat on the throne of Saint Mark for twelve years (1959-1971). Pope Kyrillos was a holy man of prayer who through full dedication…
Read MoreThomas A. Dorsey
Thomas A. Dorsey learned his religion from his Baptist minister father and piano from his music teacher mother in Villa Rica, Georgia, where he was born July 1, 1899. He came under the influence of local blues pianist when they moved to Atlanta in 1910. He and his family relocated to Chicago during World War…
Read MoreC.S. Lewis
Few authors of fantasy literature are as beloved as C.S. Lewis, born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on November 29, 1898. Time magazine has listed the first of his Chronicles of Narnia, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, as one of the top 100 English language novels written in the twentieth century. Time had earlier…
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