{"id":109,"date":"2007-08-16T13:56:01","date_gmt":"2007-08-16T13:56:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/08\/a-crucible.html"},"modified":"2007-08-16T13:56:01","modified_gmt":"2007-08-16T13:56:01","slug":"a-crucible","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/08\/a-crucible.html","title":{"rendered":"A crucible"},"content":{"rendered":"

Our public intellectuals. Our greats. What would we do without them?
\nAsk the child of one of them. <\/a>He knows.<\/p>\n

N<\/span>o photograph of him has ever been published, but those who know Daniel Miller say that he resembles his father. Some say it’s the nose, others the mischievous glimmer in the eyes when he smiles, but the most telling feature, the one that clearly identifies him as Arthur Miller’s son, is his high forehead and identically receding hairline. He is almost 41 now, but it’s impossible to say whether his father’s friends would notice the resemblance, because the few who have ever seen Daniel have not laid eyes on him since he was a week old. When his father died, in February 2005, he was not at the funeral that took place near Arthur Miller’s home, in Roxbury, Connecticut. Nor was he at the public memorial service that May, at Broadway’s Majestic Theatre, where hundreds of admirers gathered to pay homage to his father, who was, if not the greatest American playwright of the last century, then certainly the most famous. In the days after his death, at the age of 89, Arthur Miller was eulogized around the world. Newspaper obituaries and television commentators hailed his work\u2014including those keystones of the American canon Death of a Salesman<\/em> and The Crucible<\/em>\u2014and recalled his many moments in the public eye: his marriage to Marilyn Monroe; his courageous refusal, in 1956, to “name names” before the House Un-American Activities Committee; his eloquent and active opposition to the Vietnam War; his work, as the international president of pen<\/span>, on behalf of oppressed writers around the world. The Denver Post<\/em> called him “the moralist of the past American century,” and The New York Times<\/em> extolled his “fierce belief in man’s responsibility to his fellow man\u2014and [in] the self-destruction that followed on his betrayal of that responsibility.”<\/font><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Via Touchstone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Our public intellectuals. Our greats. What would we do without them? Ask the child of one of them. He knows. No photograph of him has ever been published, but those who know Daniel Miller say that he resembles his father. Some say it’s the nose, others the mischievous glimmer in the eyes when he smiles,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-109","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"yoast_head":"\nA crucible - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/08\/a-crucible.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A crucible - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Our public intellectuals. Our greats. What would we do without them? Ask the child of one of them. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}