A drawing by part-time faculty member Aileen Callahan (Fine Arts) for a book of writings by Fr. Francis Sullivan, SJ, who died in 1996. The book was published recently under the sponsorship of the Jesuit Community and Jesuit Institute.
Book Offers a Lasting Tribute to Fr. Sullivan
A dozen years after his death, Francis Patrick Sullivan, SJ, a longtime member of the University's Theology Department, is once again a published author
By
More than a dozen years after his death, Francis Patrick Sullivan, SJ, a longtime member of the University's Theology Department, is once again a published author.Conversations in an Icon, a text Fr. Sullivan wrote in the mid to late 1980s, has been published posthumously by Etoile International Productions under the sponsorship of the Jesuit Community and Jesuit Institute.
Fr. Sullivan, who died of cancer in 1996 at age 66, was a well-known poet, preacher and translator of scripture who taught at Boston College for two decades. The publication of Conversations in an Icon was a labor of love by the friends of Fr. Sullivan, an effort led by Fine Arts part-time faculty member Aileen Callahan, a frequent collaborator of Fr. Sullivan.
Fr. Sullivan was the author of three books of poetry: Table Talk with the Recent God, Spy Wednesday's Kind and Credo and Other Poems. He also was recognized for his work as a translator of scriptural texts, especially the Psalms, and authored Tragedic Psalms and Lyric Psalms. In addition, he wrote three volumes of fictional parables based on the Gospel readings. Another of his books, Indian Freedom: The Cause of Bartolome de las Casas, won an award from the Catholic Press Association.
The icon at the center of Conversations in an Icon is Andre Rublev's Holy Trinity. Fr. Sullivan writes about conversations among the entities of the Holy Trinity and a fourth voice, from the outside, contemporary world.
Callahan created 28 charcoal drawings for Conversations and contributed an essay on the relationship of the drawings to the text.
"As a visual artist, I was thrilled by the text. It's marvelous and extremely rich," said Callahan, who insists that her drawings are not illustrations, but "a prism through which words pass and return." Callahan's drawings have also appeared in three other of Fr. Sullivan's books.
Burton Raffel, a professor emeritus of Arts and Humanities at the University of Louisiana at LaFayette who has called Fr. Sullivan the "the best religious poet since Gerard Manley Hopkins," wrote the foreword for the new book. Raffel summarized Fr. Sullivan's approach to his poetry, writing "Francis reached out to the world and, in a sense, flung his poems to its far corners."
Vice President and Special Assistant to the President William Neenan, SJ, a friend and one-time fellow housemate of Fr. Sullivan's, fondly recalled the talks he and his colleague often had.
"It was searching, always searching, sometimes profound, ever probing, for something deep down in Catholic tradition," said Fr. Neenan, who was with Fr. Sullivan when he died at Youville Hospital. "Conversations in an Icon continues such conversations."
Fr. Neenan added, "Aileen Callahan's drawings are a perfect complement to Frank Sullivan's words." Callahan noted that Fr. Neenan,
Jesuit Institute Director T. Frank Kennedy, SJ, and Fine Arts Department chairman Prof. John Michalczyk were instrumental in bringing this project to fruition.
Conversations in an Icon will be available in library collections throughout campus and will be distributed to Jesuit universities in the US and Europe.