In “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” Paul Elie weaves together the historically parallel stories of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Walker Percy, and Flannery O’Connor. Truly these were four of the last century’s most remarkable Catholic writers. The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage, by Paul Elie (554 pages, [...]
Even if Flannery O’Connor’s stories are shocking, something mysterious lies beneath the violence and absurdity: the manifestation of moments of grace. Observing these moments in O’Connor’s stories can help us recognize other moments of grace in our own time and place. We can look beyond the grotesque and recognize God’s grace shining forth from the [...]
C.S. Lewis believed that every nation possesses what he called a “haunting,” a “Logres,” which baptizes it with a unique inner life. What, or where, is America’s Logres? Who is the mythological hero that could guide the American identity the way Arthur guided Britain and inspired generations of English poets and artists? During my undergraduate [...]
“Good Things Out of Nazareth: The Uncollected Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Friends” is the epistolary record of Flannery O’Connor’s other life, the life lived behind the printed page in small-town Georgia. This life is not nearly as “large and startling” as her fiction, but it is unforgettable all the same. Good Things Out of [...]
Some previously unpublished letters and postcards, only made available to scholars since 2014, reveal that Flannery O’Connor used “inexcusable racial slurs” in private correspondence. What, therefore, are we to make of this revelation of racism, however mitigated it might be by other factors, and how should it impact our reading and reception of O’Connor’s work? [...]
Quentin Tarentino’s film “Pulp Fiction” and Flannery O’Connor’s stories smell of nihilism. But at the end of the film, and at the end of O’Connor’s stories, the light of Providence glimmers tantalizingly. So there was a meaning after all! But it was not the meaning I was expecting. Pulp Fiction is the violent, witty, crazy, [...]
Let reality shape language. Reality in this sense means what is actually the case, which includes what people actually think, not what they are supposed to think. It means an order in which God provides the very grounding of the real… On Sunday afternoon, 34 high school students arrived at Wyoming Catholic College for this [...]
Is it not refined cruelty to keep alive, in self-loathing, a man who is a grave danger to the innocent and a grisly horror to himself? And to do such a thing in countries long admired for the justice of their laws? To perceive truth, we require images. As G.K. Chesterton put it, all life [...]
At its deepest, Glenn Arbery's Bearings and Distances asks and endeavours brilliantly to answer the most difficult of questions: Why do bad things happen to good people? Why are the innocent corrupted?... Bearings & Distances by Glenn Arbery (346 pages, Wiseblood Books, 2015) It’s happening. It’s finally happening. At long last, after several decades in the [...]
Not only was Flannery O’Connor one of the most important Christian Humanists of the twentieth century, but she also well understood what made Christian Humanism what it was. While it might very well be conservative, it was always imaginative, allowing one to imagine what must be conserved. The Presence of Grace by Flannery O’Connor (192 pages, [...]
In the poetry of Jeremiah Webster’s After So Many Fires, we have found Flannery O’Connor’s Protestant counterpart. Though an Anglican, Dr. Webster weaves his words on the same theological loom as O’Connor, seeing in the world’s maddening duality a divine coherence… After So Many Fires by Jeremiah Webster (65 pages, Anchor and Plume, 2017) I first encountered Jeremiah [...]
Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novels present a world teeming with people groping through guilt for a purpose they do not fully understand, often trading defiance for either despair or determination as the inescapable truth becomes clear: There is, on earth, no alleviation of the human condition… Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the [...]
In a distorted world, the Christian poet is ultimately like the blind man whose vision Christ restored to see truth through grace, and those who read the poet’s words will find their vision restored as well… Editor’s Note: This essay was originally given as a part of a lecture series for the Cambridge School of [...]
Flannery O’Connor’s fiction teaches us the need for charity toward other points of view, our personal tendency toward blindness, and the benefit of stories to enhance our vision… In 2014, I spoke at the American Embassy in Prague at a symposium on the civil rights movement in America. I made the mistake of offering Flannery O’Connor’s story [...]