Lee Oser | |
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 Oser giving the Trivium School commencement speech in 2021 | |
| Born | 1958 (age 65–66) New York City, U.S. |
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| Language | English |
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Lee Oser (born in 1958) is an American novelist, Christian humanist, and literary critic. He is a former president of the Association of Literary Scholars, Critics, and Writers. He teaches Religion and Literature at the College of the Holy Cross, in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Lee Oser was born in New York City in 1958. He is of Irish Catholic and Russian Jewish descent. He attended public high school on Long Island. After playing in rock bands and working odd jobs in Portland, Oregon, he received a B.A. from Reed College in 1988 and a Ph.D. in English from Yale University in 1995. The College of the Holy Cross hired him in 1998. As a scholar, he began his career in the field of literary modernism and is widely recognized as an authority on the poet T. S. Eliot. Over the past decade, though, he has devoted considerable time to Shakespeare. Professor Oser has published three books of literary criticism and three novels, most recently Oregon Confetti, named by Commonweal Magazine as one of its top books of 2017. He is the father of two daughters, Eleanor (HC '20) and Briana. He and his wife, Kate, have been married for thirty years. A committed Roman Catholic, he serves regularly as an extraordinary minister at Saint Paul's Cathedral, in downtown Worcester. [1]
Set on the West Coast during Bush II's first term, Out of What Chaos (Scarith], 2007) showcases the escapades of Rex and The Brains as they break into the Portland rock scene, record their first CD, and tour from Vancouver to LA behind their chart-topping single, “F U. I Just Want To Get My Rocks Off.” In the end, the boys must make a decision about how to live. Literary critic and theorist, Dr. Jean-Michel Rabaté calls Oser a "worthy debater" and praises Out of What Chaos, saying he "enjoyed it fully." [2]
Oser's second novel follows its predecessor by exploring the intersection of pop culture and religion. The young narrator, Richard Bellman, recounts his experience as personal secretary to a sixties' rock legend, Sir Ted Pop.
Early reviews have praised the novel, while focusing on Oser's attempt to address contemporary culture from a Catholic point of view. [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
Pushing forty, Portland art dealer Devin Adams has been so successful conning the local Philistines that he can no longer tell actual art from the highly profitable junk that supports his living. But the sudden appearance on his doorstep of the great painter John Sun, bearing a strange child, changes all that, confronting Devin with the hard facts of his life, from his lusts and obsessions to his own small part in a mass psychosis that denies the existence of love.
Critic Anthony Domestico lists the novel among Commonweal Magazine's Top Books of 2017, saying "Antic, absurdist, comic, and Catholic, this ribald novel grows out of the Evelyn Waugh and John Kennedy Toole tradition." [9] In other reviews of Oregon Confetti, Oser's Catholic vantage point remained a source of contention. [10] [11] [12] Critic Joseph Pearce listed Oregon Confetti in his list of "The Best of Contemporary Christian Fiction." [13]
Oser has been interviewed in the following: Crisis Magazine, [14] Dappled Things, [15] Law and Liberty. [16]
Oser’s fourth novel, published by Senex Press, is a satire that follows the protagonist Moses Shea, a disgraced newspaperman. After being dumped by his love and blacklisted in New York, Shea, thanks to his old friend from Harvard Nick Carty, ends up at the newly defunct St. Malachy’s Catholic college in Massachusetts. The novel satirizes the state of modern higher education.
Mark Bauerlein, Senior Editor at First Things, said of the novel “Lee Oser's Old Enemies is a joy to read, clever and astute, sharp and funny, satiric but humane. We have the issues of our time in dramatic light.” Noting Oser’s own Christian Humanism, Ernest Suarez, David M. O’Connell Professor of English at the Catholic University of America, wrote “Old Enemies is a contemporary version of The Praise of Folly, taking aim at the deceptions, self-deceptions, and irrationalities that so often underpin people's quests for power.”
Oser's defense of Christian humanism is set out in his book The Return of Christian Humanism. In a lengthy review-essay, Sir Anthony Kenny argued that Oser's position had been superannuated by modernity. [17] Alan Blackstock places Oser in the tradition of G. K. Chesterton and compares Oser's ethical criticism to that of Alasdair MacIntyre. [18] Oser subsequently developed his position in a 2021 essay, "Christian Humanism and the Radical Middle." [19]
Gilbert Keith Chesterton was an English author, philosopher, Christian apologist, and literary and art critic.
Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She wrote seven novels: Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–1863), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Daniel Deronda (1876). As with Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, she emerged from provincial England; most of her works are set there. Her works are known for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place and detailed depiction of the countryside. Middlemarch was described by the novelist Virginia Woolf as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people" and by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare is a 1908 novel by G. K. Chesterton. The book has been described as a metaphysical thriller.
The wise old man is an archetype as described by Carl Jung, as well as a classic literary figure, and may be seen as a stock character. The wise old man can be a profound philosopher distinguished for wisdom and sound judgment.
Father Brown is a fictional Roman Catholic priest and amateur detective. He is featured in 53 short stories by English author G. K. Chesterton, published between 1910 and 1936. Father Brown solves mysteries and crimes using his intuition and keen understanding of human nature. Chesterton loosely based him on the Rt Rev. Msgr John O'Connor (1870–1952), a parish priest in Bradford, who was involved in Chesterton's conversion to Catholicism in 1922. Since 2013, the character has been portrayed by Mark Williams in the ongoing BBC Television Series Father Brown.
Paul Elmer More was an American journalist, critic, essayist and Christian apologist.
Chang-rae Lee is a Korean-American novelist and a professor of creative writing at Stanford University. He was previously Professor of Creative Writing at Princeton and director of Princeton's Program in Creative Writing.
Christian humanism regards humanist principles like universal human dignity, individual freedom, and the importance of happiness as essential and principal or even exclusive components of the teachings of Jesus. Proponents of the term trace the concept to the Renaissance or patristic period, linking their beliefs to the scholarly movement also called 'humanism'.
Irving Babbitt was an American academic and literary critic, noted for his founding role in a movement that became known as the New Humanism, a significant influence on literary discussion and conservative thought in the period between 1910 and 1930. He was a cultural critic in the tradition of Matthew Arnold and a consistent opponent of romanticism, as represented by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Politically he can, without serious distortion, be called a follower of Aristotle and Edmund Burke. He was an advocate of classical humanism but also offered an ecumenical defense of religion. His humanism implied a broad knowledge of various moral and religious traditions. His book Democracy and Leadership (1924) is regarded as a classic text of political conservatism. Babbitt is regarded as a major influence over American cultural and political conservatism.
Joseph Pearce, is an English-born American writer, and as of 2014 Director of the Center for Faith and Culture at Aquinas College in Nashville, Tennessee, before which he held positions at Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in Merrimack, New Hampshire, Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti, Michigan and Ave Maria University in Ave Maria, Florida.
Peter Maurin was a French Catholic social activist, theologian, and De La Salle Brother who founded the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933 with Dorothy Day.
A Christian novel is a Christian literary novel which features Christian media genre conventions.
Michael David O'Brien is a Canadian author, artist, and essayist and lecturer on faith and culture. Born in Ottawa, he is self-taught, without an academic background. He writes and speaks on Catholic themes and topics, and creates the cover art for his novels in a neo-Byzantine style. He lives with his family in Combermere, Ontario, Canada.
Traditionalist conservatism, often known as classical conservatism, is a political and social philosophy that emphasizes the importance of transcendent moral principles, manifested through certain posited natural laws to which it is claimed society should adhere. It is one of many different forms of conservatism. Traditionalist conservatism, as known today, is rooted in Edmund Burke's political philosophy, which represented a combination of Whiggism and Jacobitism, as well as the similar views of Joseph de Maistre, who attributed the rationalist rejection of Christianity during previous decades of being directly responsible for the Reign of Terror which followed the French Revolution. Traditionalists value social ties and the preservation of ancestral institutions above what they perceive as excessive rationalism and individualism. One of the first uses of the phrase "conservatism" began around 1818 with a monarchist newspaper named "Le Conservateur", written by Francois Rene de Chateaubriand with the help of Louis de Bonald.
"A Song for Simeon" is a 37-line poem written in 1928 by American-English poet T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). It is one of five poems that Eliot contributed to the Ariel Poems series of 38 pamphlets by several authors published by Faber and Gwyer. "A Song for Simeon" was the sixteenth in the series and included an illustration by avant garde artist Edward McKnight Kauffer. The poems, including "A Song for Simeon", were later published in both the 1936 and 1963 editions of Eliot's collected poems.
Joseph Bottum is an American author and intellectual, best known for his writings about literature, American religion, and neoconservative politics. Noting references to his poems, short stories, scholarly work, literary criticism, and many other forms of public commentary, reviewer Mary Eberstadt wrote in National Review in 2014 that “his name would be mandatory on any objective short list of public intellectuals” in the United States. Coverage of his work includes profiles in The New York Times, South Dakota Magazine, and The Washington Times. In 2017, Bottum took a position at Dakota State University in Madison, South Dakota.
Stratford Caldecott was a Catholic author, editor, publisher, and blogger. His work spanned subjects as diverse as literature, education, theology, apologetics, economics, environmental stewardship, sacred geometry, art, and culture. His books include Secret Fire, Radiance of Being, Beauty for Truth's Sake, All Things Made New, and Not as the World Gives. He was a founding editor of the online journal Humanum and a contributor for several online and print journals. He was inspired by the Catholic author J. R. R. Tolkien and became known as a Tolkien scholar.
J. R. R. Tolkien, the author of the bestselling fantasy The Lord of the Rings, was largely rejected by the literary establishment during his lifetime, but has since been accepted into the literary canon, if not as a modernist then certainly as a modern writer responding to his times. He fought in the First World War, and saw the rural England that he loved built over and industrialised. His Middle-earth fantasy writings, consisting largely of a legendarium which was not published until after his death, embodied his realism about the century's traumatic events, and his Christian hope.
Patrick Curry is an independent Canadian-born British scholar who has worked and taught on a variety of subjects from cultural astronomy to divination, the ecology movement, and the nature of enchantment. He is known for his studies of J. R. R. Tolkien.
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