Topics

Time & the Longing for Eternity

VITAL WORKS RECONSIDERED, #56

Edmund B. Miller

Flannery O'Connor’s writing is not grotesque, not fantastic; it’s merely simple — which is to say that for her, in the end, there are only two options: time or eternity.

Fragmented Lives of Incomplete Reckoning

VITAL WORKS RECONSIDERED, #49

Edmund B. Miller

Man’s efforts are lost if they are not embedded in and do not proceed from the eternal perspective, without which they remain fragmented impulses.

What Would Flannery O'Connor Say?

A CATHOLIC RESPONSE TO SAME-SEX ATTRACTION

Anne M. Maloney

To accept our brokenness is not to resign ourselves to it or succumb to it. Our individual crosses must be carried along the path God has chosen for us, to Heaven.

Tyranny of the Perverse Will

EVIL FOR EVIL'S SAKE

Mitchell Kalpakgian

Evil offers a glamour or appeal that tempts a person to exercise his will and ignore all the laws, inhibitions, and consequences that warn of danger or tragedy.

The Catholic Dramatist in a Protestant Land

ALL THE CHURCH'S A STAGE

Kenneth Colston

Macbeth, Lear, Othello, Hamlet, Falstaff, Henry IV — are these immortal portraits of sinful humanity not the very crucible of Shakespeare’s art?

Flannery O'Connor & the Representation of Mystery

ENCOUNTERS WITH GOD

Tracy Jamison

She believes a good fiction writer intuitively adopts a sacramental and liturgical view of creation and is therefore able to portray the spiritual in the ordinary.

From the Grotesque to Love

Anne Barbeau Gardiner

Violence and suffering are to be met not with some vague feeling of compassion, but with the "unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith."

The Liberal as Graceless Pharisee

Anne Barbeau Gardiner

Flannery O'Connor admired Henry James, Hawthorne, and Poe for understanding evil better than most Americans.

Flannery O'Connor: And Her Own Received Her Not

The Catholic bishop of Lafayette, Louisiana, has banned A Good Man Is Hard to Find

The Incarnational Mind vs. the Captive Mind

VITAL WORKS RECONSIDERED, #13

Jean Bethke Elshtain

Exploring Catholicism

Guest Column

James Prothero

Affirming the Reality of the Spiritual

William D. Miller

Harvard Diary won't be a bestseller, but it should be. Coles can write — lyrically at times — and Christ is his measure of what it means to be human.

New South, Old Religion

SUN-BELT PARADOXES & EXCESSES

James J. Thompson Jr.

Is the South still the Bible Belt? Well, yes — but then, no, too: at least not in precisely the same way it used to be.

Teaching and Learning, Strutting and Conniving

HARVARD DIARY

Robert Coles

We are in continual jeopardy — of a kind I think best de­scribed by a woman I knew who worked as a food server in a Harvard dorm and in the Faculty Club.

Flannery O’Connor & the “Literary Temple”

A CHRIST WHO DISTURBS & TERRORIZES

Bruce L. Edwards Jr.

Relentlessly exposing human pride, avarice, and weakness, O'Connor agreed with C.S. Lewis that all things that are not eternal are eternally out of date.