Most Popular Books by John Moriarty

Explore the profound connection between place, love, and wildness in this captivating collection of John Moriarty's writings. Edited by Martin Shaw, this volume invites readers on a transformative journey through Irish storytelling, spirituality, and the search for meaning in the natural world. Delve into Moriarty's unique perspective on Irish mythology, philosophy, and the human experience. With a foreword by Tommy Tiernan, this collection offers a blend of personal reflections, lyrical prose, and ancient wisdom. Discover the power of Silver-Branch perception and the importance of beholding the world with open eyes and a tender heart. Perfect for readers seeking spiritual guidance, personal transformation, and a deeper understanding of Irish culture. Experience the beauty and wisdom of nature writing at its finest. Buy now and embark on a journey of self-discovery and connection with the wild.

First produced at the Central City Opera House in 1956, "The Ballad of Baby Doe" is now widely considered a classic and is the second most produced American opera. In The Ballad of Baby Doe, Duane A. Smith tells the tale of the complicated birth of this most American of operas. Inspired in 1953 by composer Douglas Moore's interest in Horace Tabor's story and funded by the Central City Opera House Association, the opera came together through a unique combination of hard work and serendipity. Smith relates how key people -- including investors and historians in addition to creative talent -- turned Moore's idea into a reality and brought the story of the Tabors to millions of opera fans worldwide. In addition, Smith compares the opera's libretto with historical reality, and the book even includes a chapter on the production written by John Moriarty, who conducted the opera in 1981, 1988, and 1996. For anyone interested in opera history or this Colorado story in particular -- the emblematic tale of silver millionaire Horace Tabor and the two women he married -- The Ballad of Baby Doe will be the definitive history for years to come.

Revised and enlarged, this edition of John Moriarty's first published work presents a book of revelations, meditated by stories and personal excursions in literture, philosophy and sacred writings.

Anaconda Canoe concludes a remarkable spiritual journey undertaken in volumes one and two, in which Turtle dives to the floor of the abyss to recover hidden intuitions about the world in a journey from ignorance to knowledge, darkness to light, from paradise lost to paradise regained. This third and final volume derives from an Amazonian myth in which, on the first morning of the world, a woman of defining importance for religion and culture ascends the primeval river in an Anaconda Canoe. As she ascends it we cannot but acknowledge her as a kind of Cortez, Ishmael, Kurtz or Jonah, come to challenge us in our most fundamental beliefs about ourselves and our universe. From the classical-Christian shores of Europe and the Mediterranean, to the farther reaches of Africa, Asia, Australia and the Americas, John Moriarty trawls the deeps of world literatures, mythology and sacred texts. The metaphoric richness in which his work is elaborated lends Anaconda Canoe, and this entire trilogy, its power to arouse and re-open the road to civilization and culture, establishing Moriarty as a major contemporary figure in Irish literature. As Thomas Mann said of The Magic Mountain, 'This is a book of departure, its service is to life, its will is to health, its goal is the future'.

In Introducing Moriarty Canadian theologian and academic Michael W. Higgins compiles the essential writings of Irish philosopher and mystic, John Moriarty. This distillation of Moriarty's texts on ecology, mysticism and spirituality is a perfect introduction to the work of this complex and, at times, esoteric philosopher. Higgins' commentary provides an excellent guide to one of the country's most enigmatic modern thinkers and is an essential addition to the library of anyone interested in Irish philosophy and spirituality.

To commemorate the fourth anniversary of the death of celebrated Irish writer and philosopher John Moriarty, we have reprinted his acclaimed autobiography Nostos. In this astonishing volume of autobiography, John Moriarty's earlier works of mystical philosophy, Dreamtime and Turtle Was Gone a Long Time, are given a biographical grounding. Inhabited by all that he reads and perceives, Moriarty recovers lost forms of sensibility and categories of understanding, reconciling them gloriously within the arc of his life. Nostos is a Greek word meaning 'homecoming'. In its plural form, nostoi, it was the name of an extensive body of literature in ancient Greece about the Greek heroes who returned from the Trojan Wars. Most of this literature has perished, but we do have The Odyssey, describing the long homecoming of Odysseus to Ithaca. Moriarty's book assumes that for various reasons humanity is now exiled from the earth, but by reimagining it and ourselves as involved in a common destiny, it enacts a homecoming, a nostos to it. Nostos is a continuous narrative describing early on how its author lost his world as surely and completely as the Aztecs lost theirs when Cortez came ashore. Thereafter, in places as far apart as neolithic North Kerry and London, Periclean Athens and Blackfoot Dancing Ground, Manitoba and Mexico, Kwakiutl coast and Connemara, the author fights his way to a kind of rest, to a requiem, at the heart of things as they terribly and resplendently are

Turtle Was Gone a Long Time: Horsehead Nebula Neighing, the second volume of a remarkable trilogy, continues John Moriarty's spiritual journey embarked upon in Crossing the Kedron. In a Prelude to Horsehead Nebula Neighing, the author poses two questions. Are we the iceberg into which the earth has crashed? Have we lost, or did we ever acquire, evolutionary legitimacy? Moriarty goes on to question the axioms and assumptions of the late twentieth century and to suggest other cosmologies, myths and metaphors through which we may 'walk beautifully upon the earth'. Mediated through poetry, philosophy and literature – from the sacred writings of Christian mystics to coffin texts of the Egyptians and cradle texts of the Navajo Indians – Moriarty transforms humanity's Pequod voyage of self-destruction into an Ishmaelite quest for Divine Ground. In his call for cultural regeneration, the author invokes alternative tongues, Native American and Hindu, shamanic north and classical south. Readings from Meister Eckhart, Malory and William Law, Pascal and Melville, Berkeley, Blake and Black Elk, Darwin and Nietzsche, the Bible, medieval morality plays and the Mandukya Upanishads guide us along ancestral trails in dialogue with 'the great tradition'. With exhilarating singularity of vision, Moriarty offers readers paradigms of co-creation and self-interrogation, and through a process of calling-to-witness makes manifest ways of being in the world.

An autobiography of John Moriarty's life in Connemara during the 1980s and the return to his native Kerry. This extra-ordinary work of autobiography concludes the story of John Moriarty's life in Connemara during the 1980s and the return to his native Kerry. He relates the particularities of his time at Toombeloa, Roundstone and environs, where he worked restoring gardens and building his own house. He describes his adopted family and the children of the household, with sorties to Dublin for Christmas; his neighbourhood and community; the writer Tim Robinson; returned pine martens, the fish and flora of a historic landscape; a lecture tour in Canada, organized by his former students; his engagement with the immensities of the natural and spiritual worlds. He calls to account the literatures and legacies of European thought made manifest in the western extremities of Ireland as they bear witness to his own inner and outer journey, now documented in this compelling and writerly masterwork.

This gripping memoir deals with a journey back from addiction and suicide. From a childhood of fear and rejection, the writer fled into adulthood fueled by ever-increasing doses of alcohol and drugs. A near-death experience forces him to confront the wasted years and potential within him, to transcend the self-hatred which sometimes besets gay men, and to engage in survival and triumph. Dramatically written and completely devoid of self-pity, this memoir is both a cautionary tale and a call to action.

In the nineteenth century, here in Ireland, we started to walk away decisively from a native language that was a way of seeing and knowing things. In the twentieth century we started to walk away from a religion that in many of its ideas and practices was a folk religion. In this century we are walking away from local accents, from the big open vowels upon which so many of our poems depend for their full auditory effect. Overall, in line with revolutionary ambitions elsewhere in the world, we have moved from rites that related us to time and eternity to rights within a body politic. Could it be that we have moved too far, too fast? The Chinese say that the sage is to be found not walking ahead of humanity, finding a way for it, but behind it, picking up the inestimable treasures it leaves behind it in its flight into an ever-receding future. While he doesn't claim to be a sage, here too is where we find Moriarty, walking hundreds, even thousands, of years behind us, picking up things. As its centenary approaches, Invoking Ireland offers an alternative to the 1916 Easter Rising Proclamation. Here Moriarty proposes not a Republic but anEnflaith, reinstituting a Birdreign in which all things live ecumenically with all things, uniting man with nature, magic and the divine. Standing shamanically and mystically with the heroes of political thinkers, among them Plato, St Augustine and Rousseau.

Years later, when I found my mother, I asked, ‘Why did you let me go?’ My mother told me, in a very soft voice, ‘My son, you were going to school. I took you to school every day ... then I went to pick you up this day and you were gone.’ John Moriarty was born to his Yanyuwa mother Kathleen Murrmayibinya and Irish father John Moriarty in Borroloola in the Gulf of Carpentaria, Northern Territory. At the age of four, as part of assimilationist policies, he was stolen from his family and placed in a children’s home. Saltwater Fella is Moriarty’s story of a childhood surviving harsh routines and poverty, hunger and racism in church institutions. It is about finding out who he is through his soccer skills and the start of a long career in advocacy for Aboriginal rights and self-determination. Moriarty’s search for his place in the world takes him from his saltwater people to co-founding an internationally acclaimed Aboriginal design company that would put the stirringly beautiful Wunala Dreaming Qantas jet in the sky. Fired by the injustices around him, Moriarty made it his life’s mission to advocate for the rights of Aboriginal people, from the successful 1967 referendum for voting rights and citizenship, through to education and decent jobs. Through his tireless work in aiding others to find their voice, he discovered his own. Saltwater Fella tells that story.

Deriving from a native Amazonian myth, this third and final volume of Turtle was Gone a Long Time re-engages with two important themes: our efforts to find and navigate the evolutionary channel, and our efforts to bring in new myths and re-open the road to civilization and culture.

This paper examines peer effects in adolescent cannabis use from several different reference groups, exploiting survey data that have many desirable properties and have not previously been used for this purpose. Treating the school grade as the reference group, and using both neighbourhood fixed effects and IV for identification, we find evidence of large, positive, and statistically significant peer effects. Treating nominated friends as the reference group, and using both school fixed effects and IV for identification, we again find evidence of large, positive, and generally statistically significant peer effects. Our preferred IV approach exploits information about friends of friends – ‘friends once removed’, who are not themselves friends – to instrument for friends’ cannabis use. Finally, we examine whether the cannabis use of schoolmates who are not nominated as friends – ‘non-friends’ – influences own cannabis use. Once again using neighbourhood fixed effects and IV for identification, the evidence suggests zero impact. In our data, schoolmates who are not also friends have no influence on adolescent cannabis use.