Birth and Early Life
Ryan was born on May 25, 1869, in Vermillion (Dakota County), Minnesota, to William Ryan and Maria Luby. Raised in the Populist tradition on a farm homesteaded by his Irish Catholic parents alongside his ten younger siblings, Ryan’s childhood experience with the challenges faced by farmers informed his early investment in economic justice and the role of the Catholic Church in promoting social change.
Ryan’s interest in moral reflection on contemporary economic issues and empathy for the poor was further cultivated in his early teenage years when Ryan read Henry George’s Progress and Poverty. While Ryan later confessed to not fully understanding the book at the time, he cites his first reading of George’s work as the beginning of a life long commitment to questions of social justice.
Read more about this topic: John A. Ryan
Famous quotes containing the words birth and, birth, early and/or life:
“But pale despair and cold tranquillity,
Nature’s vast frame, the web of human things,
Birth and the grave, that are not as they were.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“Some say that ever ‘gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
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The nights are wholesome, then no planets strike,
No fairy tale nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow’d and so gracious is the time.”
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“We have been told over and over about the importance of bonding to our children. Rarely do we hear about the skill of letting go, or, as one parent said, “that we raise our children to leave us.” Early childhood, as our kids gain skills and eagerly want some distance from us, is a time to build a kind of adult-child balance which permits both of us room.”
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“Half life is over now,
And I meet full face on dark mornings
The bestial visor, bent in
By the blows of what happened to happen.
What does it prove? Sod all.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)