Preserving a Way of Life 

Rabbit Island is a real-world place with a powerful associated legend. It’s said that the island was visited during the fifth century by St. Brigid, a patron saint of Ireland. The water from St. Brigid’s Well, named in her honor, was long believed to possess sacred powers when touched or swallowed, and Maeve, like her father, uses water from the well in her work as a healer. Maeve may have inherited the calling from her father, but water for him becomes both salve and downfall when he drowns during a boating accident, leaving Maeve adrift in every sense. That is, until she meets Seamus, a charismatic medical student bound for Dublin. She suddenly faces a choice: Should she remain on the island, tethered to ritual, or move to the city to study nursing?

The title Salvage has two meanings, Kearney explained. “The obvious meaning, which is the one I intended, is that the islanders live off salvage from sunken ships, since the novel takes place during the Second World War. But it’s also an attempt to ‘salvage’ the old ways of natural healing and a belief that the sacred is in nature, in the sea, in all creatures. It’s an attempt to perhaps salvage that way of life.” He’s currently at work on a film script for the novel.

These themes appear in much of Kearney’s recent philosophical work, including the upcoming book Hosting Earth, which is scheduled for publication in 2024. That work derives from an initiative called the Guestbook Project, of which Kearney is codirector, that promotes storytelling as a method of healing for young people who live in communities that are experiencing conflict. The idea is to build bridges by exchanging narratives, a process Kearney calls “narrative hospitality.” This experiential initiative, founded in 2008, sprung directly from his work at Boston College. “It’s really an invitation for young people in divided communities—very inspired by Northern Ireland—to come together, exchange their stories, and listen to those of their ‘opponents’ on the other side,” he said. In one example, a Catholic and Protestant student in Northern Ireland recently exchanged uniforms and visited one another’s schools as peace ambassadors, recording a video of their experiences. Similar exchanges have taken place around the world, from Mexico to Armenia. “Ideally, once they empathize and sympathize with the story of their adversary, the idea is to come up with a third narrative, which they co-create together,” Kearney explained.

The interrelatedness of even the most different-seeming people and societies is a thread that runs through many of Kearney’s ideas and projects, but the dynamics of still another relationship have animated his recent work—that of humans and the planet on which they live. “How might we host the Earth, as the Earth hosts us?” he said. “This urgent and timely ecological question is about a deep concern for the earth. It’s an ecological, ethical awareness about our environmental health and climate crisis.”