THE AUTHOR

Barnard Ardglass was born in County Donegal, Ireland, in a village divided by an international frontier and with two police forces. The local pilgrimage at Lough Derg brought people from far and wide. There he learned his first lessons on politics and on the mix of fact and fiction in religious teaching. He went to school in Ireland and Britain. He returned to Ireland to his alma mater for over a decade. He moved to New York and worked in research and research administration. Across Europe and America, he saw the constant traits of humanity, and he came to appreciate his schooling in Ireland in, for example, “the still sad music of humanity.” Friends and correspondents helped him to flesh out ideas of the unity of nature even if much of that unity is imagined—the imagined life is at least as important as the experienced life.