Ryan Carroll is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Comparative Literature. He researches information theory and narrative in 19th-century British, American, and literature. He studies how narrative texts, including sensation fictions, American Romanticist novels, epic poems, slave narratives, and investigative journalism experiment with ways of synthesizing bare facts into narratives, and thus theorize how to navigate an information overloaded world.
He is a longtime enthusiast of Ignatian spirituality, having first become involved through the Ignatian Spirituality Ministry at Holy Trinity Catholic Church in Washington, D.C. In his academic and creative work, he is interested in uniting “secular” fields of literary studies with sacramental and liberation theology, especially that of figures like Ignacio Ellacuria, Edward Schillebeeckx, and Karl Rahner. He currently resides in Durham, North Carolina, where he mostly works on finding God in all
It was serendipity (which might be synonymous with divine grace), that led me to the poetry of Peter O’Leary. On a lark, I checked out
Spiritual poetry can be a source of consolation, a form of edification and gateway to God through beauty — but in ministerial settings, it can
