Ivan Illich
Ivan Illich, who has died of cancer aged 76, was one of the world’s great thinkers, a polymath whose output covered vast terrains. He worked in 10 languages; he was a jet-age ascetic with few possessions; he explored Asia and South America on foot; and his obligations to his many collaborators led to a constant…
Read MoreJohn Paul II
KAROL JÓZEF WOJTYŁA, elected Pope on 16 October 1978, was born in Wadowice, Poland, on 18 May 1920. He was the third of three children born to Karol Wojtyła and Emilia Kaczorowska, who died in 1929. His elder brother Edmund, a physician, died in 1932, and his father, Karol, a non-commissioned officer in the army,…
Read MoreWalker Percy
Walker Alexander Percy, a writer who was raised in Greenville, Mississippi, was born to Leroy and Martha Percy on May 28, 1916, in Birmingham, Alabama. His parents later had two other sons, Phin and Roy. Young Walker had a hard life. At the tender age of thirteen, his father, a successful lawyer in Birmingham, took his own…
Read MoreJacques 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 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 MoreReinhold Niebuhr
Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr was born 21 June 1892 in Wright City, Missouri, to Lydia Hosto and Gustav Niebuhr, a minister of the German Evangelical Synod of North America. At age fifteen Niebuhr entered the Synod’s proseminary, Elmhurst College. Three years later he enrolled at Eden Theological Seminary, where he received his B.Div. and was…
Read MorePaul Tillich
Paul Tillich was born 20 August 1886 in Starzeddel then a province of Brandenberg Germany (now part of Poland). His family moved to Berlin in 1900 when his father was called to a position as a Lutheran pastor. After graduating from the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium in 1904 Tillich attended the universities of Berlin Tübingen and…
Read MoreNikolai Berdyaev
Berdyaev was born on March 6, 1874, in Kiev. His father had come from a military family and was himself an officer in the Imperial Guards. His mother, Princess Kudashev, was half French, but also belonged to Polish nobility. The family religion was Orthodox. Early in his life he developed a tic douloureux which caused him both…
Read MoreFyodor Dostoevsky
“Life is in ourselves and not in the external,” writes Fyodor Dostoevsky in a letter to his brother dated December 22, 1849. “To be a human being among human beings, and remain one forever, no matter what misfortunes befall, not to become depressed, and not to falter–this is what life is, herein lies its task.”…
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