Flannery O'Connor

Why Reality Ought to Shape Language

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...

Criminal Character and Mercy

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?...

A Fictional Path to Understanding the Mystery of Suffering

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)

Intelligent Piety: The Christian Humanism of Flannery O’Connor

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...

“After So Many Fires”: Sacrament of a Broken World

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...

Changing the World Through Guilt

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...

Restoring Poetic Vision in a Myopic Age

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...

How Flannery O’Connor Can Heal Our Fractured Politics

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...

Making and Revealing

Making art is a mode of revealing the world in new ways... For the past two weeks, I’ve been writing about the opportunity to make a new Catholic culture, not from scratch and not from attempts to...

The Iconographic Fiction of Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor made it her task to show her readers that the world is surrounded by mystery and that the physical creation is itself an icon and a window into that mystery... “What...

The Violent Assault Upon Imagination

How fallen we are, from Dante and Beatrice to John Hinckley and Jodie Foster. "We did the best job with what we had to work with," the twenty-two-year-old jury foreman said after the unanimous decision that Hinckley was...

How Should We Treat the Evil of Flannery O’Connor’s Misfits?

It is well to be reminded again and again that, though we like to think ourselves advance agents of such progress, the strategy of gnostic manipulation of being is very ancient. John Milton suggests the point: Satan's...

Flannery O’Connor’s Hollow Men

Many of Flannery O'Connor's stories portray the ineptness of men to uphold traditional ideals of manhood. The men show no leadership, they do not protect or care for their family members, they lack all manner of chivalry,...

The Violent Wisdom of Flannery O’Connor

Francis Marion Tarwater’s uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to...