originally published 11/30/2023

Jessica Hooten Wilson spent the last ten years exploring and organizing the unfinished third novel that Flannery O’Connor was writing when she died, and that effort resulted in publication as Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage? A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress (Brazos Press, 2024). Wilson discusses why Protestants might have a harder time with O’Connor’s aesthetic and theological sensibilities that cause her to engage deeply with darkness and the ruinous nature of sin. Central to O’Connor’s vision was exploring transformation of her characters through various situations and cataclysmic events. Wilson describes certain character “types” that were common in O’Connor’s fiction, arguing that these character types grew in complexity and nuance as the writer matured, which is evidenced in the unfinished work she left behind.

27 minutes

PREVIEW

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In this Conversation, Ken Myers talks with Fr. Damian Ference, author of Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist: The Philosophical Foundations of Flannery O’Connor’s Narrative Art (Word on Fire, 2023). Fr. Ference explores the depths to which O’Connor was steeped in Thomistic philosophy, as evidenced by her reading habits, letters, prayer journal, and, of course, essays and fiction. He also discusses the influence on O’Connor of Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain. Her “graced attentiveness” and commitment as an artist to reality in her work, Ference says, allowed her to “novelize philosophy” in a powerful and non-didactic manner. Ference and Myers discuss O’Connor’s contrarian nature, struggle with suffering, sense of humor, use of violence in her fiction, and sense of calling to honor God as an artist.

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