Fr. Nathan O’Halloran, SJ grew up on the Lord’s Ranch in Vado, New Mexico.  Son of two missionary parents, his upbringing included weekly trips to Juarez, Mexico to serve the poor in the city prisons, as well as weekly pro-life ministry of various kinds.  He also spent long hours on horseback with Fr. Rick Thomas, SJ, the founder of the Lord’s Ranch and Our Lady’s Youth Center in El Paso, Texas.  His most important early literary influences were J.R.R. Tolkien and Bill Watterson.  After graduating from Franciscan University of Steubenville, Ohio Fr. Nathan joined the Society of Jesus in Grand Coteau, Louisiana.  He went on to complete his masters degrees at Fordham University in New York City and the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, California.  He is now pursuing a Ph.D. in Theology at the University of Notre Dame. He recently received a banjo for his birthday, which will hopefully allow him to become a banjo-picking roadie for Old Crow Medicine Show.  Fr. Nathan enjoys playing soccer, smoking cigars, sipping Irish or American whiskey, and backpacking.

Favorite quotes:

“To live we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation.  When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a sacrament.  When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a desecration.  In such a desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want.”  ~ Wendell Berry

“What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them. All his reverence and all his fondness and all the leanings of his life were for the ardent-hearted and they would always be so and never be otherwise.” ~ Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses