Deus Misereatur

The Habit of Being by Flannery O'Connor My rating: 5 of 5 stars I didn't know how well I'd do plodding through seventeen years of letters. But the compilation of Flannery O'Connor's correspondence in "The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor" ended up being an enjoyable read, and a voyage of discovery. This volume, compiled, selected and edited by her long time friend, Sally Fitzgerald, brought out aspects of O'Connor that are not easily divined from her novellas and short stories. If a reader wants to know the details of the content of "The Habit of Being," I'll refer them to the other reviews. I will simply point out four items that stand out to me above the numerous other characteristics I sighted. First, O'Connor was truly a child of her time and her place. Most of her life was spent in Georgia, with only a few small stints in Iowa, Connecticut, and shorter stays in a couple of other places. So her language and r...

If Eugene Peterson can turn Wendell Berry's works toward preaching and pastoring, then I can turn Flannery O'Connor's in a similar direction. O'Connor wrote tons of letter until the day of her death. One of them was to a female friend whom she had long been encouraging to write. This young woman was crushed when she received some criticism on one of her yet-to-be published books. O'Connor responded to her in her sober, sensible and Southern fashion. What she says about criticism, and how to take it, struck me as very fitting for sermons. Below is her comment that I will slightly (and obviously) modify toward preaching: "No matter how just the criticism, any criticism at all which depresses you to the extent that you feel you cannot ever [preach] anything worth anything is from the Devil and to subject yourself to it is for you an occasion of sin. In you, the talent is there and you are expected to use it. Whether the work itself is completely successful,...

This is one of my favorite quotations from Flannery O'Connors letters: “To see Christ as God and man is probably no more difficult today than it has always been, even if today there seem to be more reasons to doubt. For you it may be a matter of not being able to accept what you call a suspension of the laws of the flesh and the physical, but for my part I think that when I know what the laws of the flesh and the physical really are, then I will know what God is. We know them as we see them, not as God sees them. For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified. I have always thought that purity was the most mysterious of the virtues, but it occurs to me that it would never have entered the human consciousness to conc...

A Subversive Gospel: Flannery O’Connor and the Reimagining of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth Michael Mears Bruner IVP Academic InterVarsity Press PO Box 1400 Downers Grove, IL 60515 ISBN: 978-0-8308-5066-2; $30.00; October 2017 I can’t even recall how or why it came about, but around twenty years ago I tripped across Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” and was hooked! Since then I have read most of her writings and a few works by others analyzing her style and stories. Recently Michael Mears Bruner, associate professor of practical theology at Azusa Pacific University in California, and ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church (USA), has presented his own examination of O’Connor in a 260 page softback, “A Subversive Gospel: Flannery O’Connor and the Reimagining of Beauty, Goodness, and Truth,” which is part of IVP Academic’s “Studies in Theology and the Arts” series. This well-written volume is ideal for O’Connor aficionados, amateurs and interested au...

A Prayer Journal by Flannery O'Connor My rating: 4 of 5 stars I'm not sure how happy she would have been with this volume. I suspect she would have blustered and blushed scarlet. Nevertheless, this tiny little book is the publication of Flannery O'Connor's prayers while she was in graduate school at the University of Iowa from 1946 to 1947. In many ways it is a touching read to be perusing the musings of her soul as they spilled out on the page. The first half of "A Prayer Journal" is introduced by W.A. Sessions, who visited and corresponded with O'Connor during those years. Then for the next several pages are the prayers of O'Connor, aesthetically cleaned up and mildly re-punctuated. The last half presents facsimiles of the original handwritten journal. The prayers show the soul-wrestling of a young woman who believed, and prayed God to help her unbelief, "Dear God, I don't want to have invented my faith to satisfy my weakness. I don...

A Political Companion to Flannery O’Connor Ed. Henry T. Edmondson III University Press of Kentucky ISBN: 978-0-8131-6940-8; $60.00; June 2017 While one of my daughters was sitting in her college literature class in Mississippi, the professor assigned a short story by Flannery O’Connor. She plaintively raised her hand and asked him if she had to read it. Her instructor stated pointedly, “yes,” and then inquired as to why she asked. “My dad made me read Flannery O’Connor during High School, and she gives me a headache!”  Her response impressed him, to say the least. Beyond giving High School students headaches, there is a deep value to reading the novellas and short stories of Flannery O’Connor, which is thoughtfully played out in a new work, “A Political Companion to Flannery O’Connor” edited by Henry T. Edmondson III, the Carl Vinson Endowed Chair of Political Science and Public Administration at Georgia College. This 398 page clothbound edition is a gold...

Tuesday morning (14 August 2012), while out running by Lake Hefner in Oklahoma City, this scene caught up my attention and started my imagination racing: The first place my thoughts flew to was a scene in Flannery O’Connor’s “The Displaced Person.” You would have to have read the whole story to catch the multifaceted point she was making through the peacocks, but the scene is as follows:      “The priest let his eyes wander toward the birds. They had reached the middle of the lawn. The cock stopped suddenly and curving his neck backwards, he raised his tail and spread it with a shimmering timbrous noise. Tiers of small pregnant suns floated in a green-gold haze over his head. The priest stood transfixed, his jaw slack. Mrs. McIntyre wondered where she had ever seen such an idiotic old man. “Christ will come like that!” he said in a loud gay voice and wiped his hand over his mouth and stood, gaping.      Mrs. McIntyre’s face assumed a set purita...