About Thomas McCarthy

Tom has been a lifelong student of language and mystery. He needed a certain facility with both in order to survive his childhood in Omaha as the eighth of nine children, a blessing from which he sought frequent refuge in the Hardy Boys, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Tolkien and Dickens. Apparently, Jesuit high school and university wasn’t quite enough of the Jesuits, because while earning a Master’s degree in English at Oxford he spent two years living in a Jesuit community. When he wasn’t imbibing Oxford’s heady mixture of medieval tradition and contemporary élan, he could be found bicycling along Europe’s back roads and, on one unfortunate occasion, the Autobahn.

He received a PhD in English Literature and Language from Harvard, where he received a Mellon Fellowship and was appointed Lecturer in History and Literature. Subsequent teaching appointments include Georgetown University, Macalester College and the University of Minnesota.

Drawn to an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural way of thinking, Tom speaks and teaches on subjects that reflect his deep and abiding interest in the indefinable, ineffable and mysterious. Recent courses have centered on such topics as urban consciousness, borders, wilderness, death, identity and the politics of language.

For five years Tom wrote a monthly column in America magazine on the interplay between intellectual and spiritual life which formed the basis of the book, From This Clay: Gifts, Surprises and Questions from the Spiritual Quest. Other books include Relationships of Sympathy: The Writer and the Reader in British Romanticism.

Raised as a straightforward meat-eating Catholic, since his early 20s Tom has chosen a more complicated path to spiritual and physical well-being. He’s been vegan since the early 2000s and is an avid amateur chef and baker. “Recovering Catholic” would be a glib characterization of his spiritual journey, which more accurately could be described as an earnest but circuitous work in progress.

He and his wonderful wife, who have two grown daughters, divide their time between Minneapolis and Tucson.

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