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 [...]
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 appropriate whatever happens to be popular at the moment, but from the immense resources available in the tradition [...]
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 word says, the image shows silently; what we have heard, we have seen.” That is how the Seventh Great Ecumenical Council [...]
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 innocent by reason of insanity. And surely that is a conclusion we must come to, examining the [...]
We encounter all too often in our modern world the spectacular violence of such escapades as the Misfit’s murder of an anonymous family on a Georgia back road. Our daily press is full of such incidents. Its corollary, however, O’Connor expects us to come to through reflection. It is well to be reminded again and [...]
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, and they lose a sense of priority as they commit to careers and professions or social and political [...]