For those doing all right by themselves like Flannery O’Connor’s Misfit, Christ’s Resurrection from the dead throws everything off balance because it introduces something entirely new. To believe the testimony of the Gospels opens avenues to happiness that are entirely discomfiting to the complacency of mere identity. Flannery O’Connor had a way of compressing whole [...]
Flannery O’Connor knew that her readers would only begin to see the beauty of a life with Christ by seeing the ugliness of a world without Him. Upon my arrival in the United States at the beginning of the present century, I was woefully ignorant of the American literature of the previous century. Today, almost [...]
An artist is precisely what Flannery O’Connor thought she was. As such, she was a maker, but not a creator. As Fr. Damian Ference puts it, she was a maker of things according to right reason. And reason, as O’Connor once put it, had “lost ground among us” as of the mid-twentieth century; hence 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 [...]
Flannery O’Connor clearly has a soft spot for her Southern religious freaks. She sees in their insanity the germ of genuine belief, and recognizes in them an antidote to the bland, uniform indoctrination into a culture where materialistic atheism is the assumed worldview. In her short stories, and culminating in The Violent Bear It Away—her [...]
In Flannery O’Connor’s "Wise Blood," the Church of preacher Hazel Motes is a Church of Moralistic, Therapeutic Deism. It is a Church Without Christ because no redeemer is needed. Is this not what the majority of twenty-first century Christianity has become? In re-reading Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood I’m struck by the prophetic precision with which [...]
Christian humility is clearly what Flannery O'Connor's protagonists most lack. What characterizes them in its absence is pride, which O’Connor attributed to inherent sinfulness. Her protagonists undergo powerful spiritual transformations that result from discomfiting experiences effected by the grace of God. Flannery O’Connor’s Religious Imagination: A World with Everything Off Balance, by George A. Kilcourse, [...]
Flannery O’Connor understood that what is wrong with the world is not our failure to adhere to a certain political or economic program, as important as these may be. Instead, what is wrong with the world is sin. And so, the task for those of us who want to renew and preserve Western culture is [...]
Even many fans of Flannery O'Connor are unaware that she wrote the introduction to a story by Dominican nuns about a sick girl they cared for until her death at age twelve. Mary Ann Long's extraordinarily vibrant spirit brought a remarkable interior beauty to the convent, a place beset with so much suffering. This slim [...]
In re-reading John Steinbeck’s rather second-rate, miserable "Of Mice and Men," I couldn’t help comparing it to Flannery O’Connor’s short story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find." Both feature murderous misfits, but Steinbeck and O’Connor treat the phenomenon in astonishingly different ways, revealing their own deeper philosophy and religious views. Browsing my bookshelves recently, [...]
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 [...]
“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? [...]