The Land Left Behind Autumn 2012

Editor’s note: The Irish Among Us
Features
Off the Coast
The islands, home to the Irish for centuries, are beautiful, abandoned and silent now — but still divulge stories through those who left and what is left behind.
Standing in Their Footprints
As I listened to the gentle wind moving the grass around the vacant buildings, I was struck by the soft footprint of the people who once lived there. Shark had been abandoned for only about 50 years, but already the former residents’ lives, memories and histories were disappearing.
To Be an Irish American Is Often To Be Haunted
When you grow up as an Irish American, you often grow up homesick for a country you have never seen, because you feel that no matter how much your ancestors have sacrificed, the world you have was only formed because they lost their own.
Forty Shades of Green
Talk among the Irish today tends to revolve around new realities of unsettling change. The country’s roller-coaster ride over the past two decades has produced, if not 40 competing emotions, at least a baker’s dozen of separate responses..
Useless Beauty: A Canticle for the Cosmos
What do we make of a universe saturated with an extravagance of beauty?
Life as We Know It
From the beginning the human race has scanned the heavens for the meaning of our existence and signs of creatures living far, far away. The search itself says a lot about who we are.
His Last Game
Fast Tracking
Kelsey Falter and the hungry, obsessive, speeded-up, success-driven, all-out road to tech stardom. She’s enjoying the ride.
A Climb Too High
And a friend for life
John Bellairs Author of the Imaginary
John Bellairs ’59, the celebrated creator of spooky and suspenseful children’s literature, was once my witty and fun-loving guide through the magical vacationland that was Notre Dame.
University News
- Speaking of Irish
- The story of Irish
- Irish studies
- The Easter Rising will be televised . . . 100 years later
- You can go home again
- How the (Fighting) Irish engage civilization
- Giving voice to a new generation
- Nice to have already met you
- Seen and heard on campus
- Deaths in the family