Michael D. O'Brien is a Roman Catholic

Roman Catholic Church

The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the world's largest Christian church, with over a billion members. Led by the Pope, it defines its mission as spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ, administering the sacraments and exercising charity...

 author, artist, and frequent essayist and lecturer on faith and culture, living in Combermere

Combermere, Ontario

Combermere is a village located along the Madawaska River in south-eastern Ontario, Canada. It is part of Township of Madawaska Valley.Combermere is best known as home to Madonna House, but the community hosts a farmer's market and also provides access to numerous lakes and rivers for cottagers and...

, Ontario

Ontario

Ontario is a province of Canada, located in east-central Canada. It is Canada's most populous province and second largest in total area. It is home to the nation's most populous city, Toronto, and the nation's capital, Ottawa....

, Canada

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

. Born in Ottawa

Ottawa

Ottawa is the capital of Canada, the second largest city in the Province of Ontario, and the fourth largest city in the country. The city is located on the south bank of the Ottawa River in the eastern portion of Southern Ontario...

, he is self-taught, without an academic

Academia

Academia is the community of students and scholars engaged in higher education and research.-Etymology:The word comes from the akademeia in ancient Greece. Outside the city walls of Athens, the gymnasium was made famous by Plato as a center of learning...

 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

Apocalypticism

Apocalypticism is the religious belief that there will be an apocalypse, a term which originally referred to a revelation of God's will, but now usually refers to belief that the world will come to an end time very soon, even within one's own lifetime...

 novels collectively entitled Children of the Last Days. The best-selling first novel in the series, Father Elijah: An Apocalypse (Ignatius Press

Ignatius Press

Ignatius Press, named for Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit Order, is a Catholic publishing house based in San Francisco, California, USA. It was founded in 1978 by Father Joseph Fessio SJ, a Jesuit priest and former pupil of Pope Benedict XVI...

, 1996), tells the story of a Jewish

Judaism

Judaism ) is the "religion, philosophy, and way of life" of the Jewish people...

 Holocaust

The Holocaust

The Holocaust , also known as the Shoah , was the genocide of approximately six million European Jews and millions of others during World War II, a programme of systematic state-sponsored murder by Nazi...

 survivor named David Schäfer who converts

Religious conversion

Religious conversion is the adoption of a new religion that differs from the convert's previous religion. Changing from one denomination to another within the same religion is usually described as reaffiliation rather than conversion.People convert to a different religion for various reasons,...

 to Catholicism, becomes a Carmelite

Carmelites

The Order of the Brothers of Our Lady of Mount Carmel or Carmelites is a Catholic religious order perhaps founded in the 12th century on Mount Carmel, hence its name. However, historical records about its origin remain uncertain...

 priest, and takes the name Father Elijah. The novel includes depictions of a Prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith , previously known as the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition , and after 1904 called the Supreme...

 and a Pope, who resemble Pope Benedict XVI-Cardinal Ratzinger and Pope John Paul II-Cardinal Karol Wojtyla. The fictional pope tasks Father Elijah with a secret mission: to confront the Antichrist

Antichrist

The term or title antichrist, in Christian theology, refers to a leader who fulfills Biblical prophecies concerning an adversary of Christ, while resembling him in a deceptive manner...

, bring him to repentance

Repentance

Repentance is a change of thought to correct a wrong and gain forgiveness from a person who is wronged. In religious contexts it usually refers to confession to God, ceasing sin against God, and resolving to live according to religious law...

, and thus postpone the Great Tribulation

Tribulation

The Great Tribulation refers to tumultuous events that are described during the "signs of the times", first mentioned by Jesus in the Olivet discourse...

. 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 (White Horse Press, 1996)
• Strangers and Sojourners (Ignatius Press, 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 (Ignatius Press, 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 (Ignatius Press, 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 (Ignatius Press, 2003) (5th Novel in the Children of the Last Days series) Rose Wâbos. Abandoned as an infant, Rose is raised by her grandmother, Oldmary Wâbos, in the remotest regions of the northern Ontario wilderness. The story covers a period from 1940 to 1973, chronicling Rose’s growth to womanhood, her discovery of art, her moving out into the world of cities and sophisticated cultural circles.
• Sophia House (Ignatius Press, 2005) Depicts the experiences of the young David Schäfer/Fr. Elijah while being sheltered by Pawel Tarnowski, a Polish Catholic during the Second World War.
• Island of the World (Ignatius Press, 2007) Tells the story of Josip Lasta, the son of an impoverished school teacher in a remote village high in Bosnia and Herzegowina.
• Theophilos (Ignatius Press, 2010) Historic Fiction centered on Theophilos, here portrayed as the adopted father of St. Luke the Evangelist.
• Winter Tales (Justin Press, 2011)
• A Father's Tale (Ignatius Press, 2011) Canadian bookseller Alex Graham is a middle-age widower whose quiet life is turned upside down when his college-age son disappears without any explanation or trace of where he has gone. With minimal resources, the father begins a long journey that takes him for the first time away from his safe and orderly world.

The themes presented in O'Brien's Children of the Last Days series are similar to those presented in Robert Hugh Benson

Robert Hugh Benson

Robert Hugh Benson was the youngest son of Edward White Benson and his wife, Mary...

's Lord of the World

Lord of the World

Lord of the World is a 1908 apocalyptic novel by Robert Hugh Benson. It is sometimes deemed one of the first modern dystopias. Michael D. O'Brien's Catholic apocalyptic series, Children of the Last Days follows a very similar theme as well....

, 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

Western culture

Western culture, sometimes equated with Western civilization or European civilization, refers to cultures of European origin and is used very broadly to refer to a heritage of social norms, ethical values, traditional customs, religious beliefs, political systems, and specific artifacts and...

 is in severe decline

Decline

Decline is a change over time from previously efficient to inefficient organizational functioning, from previously rational to non-rational organizational and individual decision-making, from previously law-abiding to law violating organizational and individual behavior, from previously virtuous to...

 as well as heading towards a "New Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism

Totalitarianism is a political system where the state recognizes no limits to its authority and strives to regulate every aspect of public and private life wherever feasible...

."

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

Neopaganism

Neopaganism is an umbrella term used to identify a wide variety of modern religious movements, particularly those influenced by or claiming to be derived from the various pagan beliefs of pre-modern Europe...

 ideology where good and evil is not strongly defined. The book features O'Brien's criticism of fantasy works ranging from C. S. Lewis

C. S. Lewis

Clive Staples Lewis , commonly referred to as C. S. Lewis and known to his friends and family as "Jack", was a novelist, academic, medievalist, literary critic, essayist, lay theologian and Christian apologist from Belfast, Ireland...

' The Chronicles of Narnia

The Chronicles of Narnia

The Chronicles of Narnia is a series of seven fantasy novels for children by C. S. Lewis. It is considered a classic of children's literature and is the author's best-known work, having sold over 100 million copies in 47 languages...

and J. R. R. Tolkien

J. R. R. Tolkien

John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, CBE was an English writer, poet, philologist, and university professor, best known as the author of the classic high fantasy works The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion.Tolkien was Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Pembroke College,...

's The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings is a high fantasy epic written by English philologist and University of Oxford professor J. R. R. Tolkien. The story began as a sequel to Tolkien's earlier, less complex children's fantasy novel The Hobbit , but eventually developed into a much larger work. It was written in...

to Anne McCaffrey

Anne McCaffrey

Anne Inez McCaffrey was an American-born Irish writer, best known for her Dragonriders of Pern series. Over the course of her 46 year career she won a Hugo Award and a Nebula Award...

's Dragonriders of Pern

Dragonriders of Pern

Dragonriders of Pern is a science fiction series written primarily by the late American-Irish author Anne McCaffrey, who initiated it in 1967. Beginning 2003, her middle child Todd McCaffrey has written Pern novels, both solo and jointly with Anne. The series comprises 22 novels and several short...

. (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:

• 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)
• Waiting: Stories for Advent (Justin Press, 2010)
• Father at Night (Justin Press, 2011)

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.

External links

• studiObrien, Michael D. O'Brien's official website
• studiObrien Foreign Language Translations Foreign Language Translations of Michael D. O'Brien's books.
• Harry Potter and the paganization of children's culture, by Michael D. O'Brien
• Book Review of Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, from Vivificat!
• Spanish version of the above review of Father Elijah: An Apocalypse from Vivificat en Español
• Book review of Theophilos, at the Vivificat blog.
• Book review of The Father's Tale: A Novel, also at the Vivificat blog.