
released 3/21/2025
In honor of the 100th anniversary of Flannery O’Connor’s birthday (March 25, 1925), we have gathered here an aural feast of interviews with O’Connor scholars and aficionados discussing her life, work, and faith. Comprising hours of conversation, this Feature attempts to do justice to the writer’s legacy. It includes interviews with Ralph Wood, Susan Srigley, Jessica Hooten Wilson, Fr. Damian Ference, Joseph Nicolello, Henry T. Edmundson, and Patrick Samway. Topics discussed include O’Connor’s wisdom, political philosophy, sacramental and incarnation imagination, personal and professional relationships, literary and spiritual influences, unique personality, and unfinished third novel.
3 hours, 28 minutes
PREVIEW
The player for the full version of this Feature is only available to current members. If you have an active membership, log in here. If you’d like to become a member — with access to all our audio programs — sign up here.
Related reading and listening
- Knowing and living our metaphysical totality — Clyde Kilby on the power of myth to bring together “the slender hints of the knowable”
- Savoring the taste of Reality — C. S. Lewis on the transporting, illuminating capacity of Myth
- When myth becomes fact — In this 1976 interview, Clyde Kilby (1902–1986) discusses C. S. Lewis’s critique of scientism and rationalism, his belief in the primacy of the imagination, and his mythic vision. (37 minutes)
- A sampling of newly published lectures — Ken Myers introduces listeners to four recently released lectures, courtesy of our Partners. The lecturers are Jennifer Frey, Gary Saul Morson, N. T. Wright, and Andrew Kern. (27 minutes)
- Grace and Christian realism — Jennifer Frey explores Thomist elements in Flannery O’Connor’s theology and writing, with a particular emphasis on a Thomist understanding of art. (39 minutes)
- A “cosmological omnibus” — George Grant recounts the fascinating history of Hernando Colón’s attempt in the 16th century to curate a universal library of the world’s knowledge. (41 minutes)
- Theology and the imagination — Jeffrey Barbeau explains what made C. S. Lewis an effective “translator” of theology for non-theologians. (21 minutes)
- The pathos of sin —
FROM VOL. 15 Poet Robert Pinsky discusses his translation of Dante’s Inferno. (9 minutes) - Existential preparation for reading literature —
FROM VOL. 128 Rod Dreher recounts how he thought he was reading Dante’s Commedia, when in reality the poem was reading him. (18 minutes) - An icon of the whole world — Jason Baxter explains how Dante includes a panoply of characters and creatures in his Comedia, offering a prismatic view of all of Creation in its glory. (20 minutes)
- Moral reasoning and human flourishing — Tim McIntosh describes moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s intellectual conversion to a synthesis of Aristotelian ethics and Christianity, best embodied in Thomism. (44 minutes)
- The soul’s awakening —
FROM VOL. 145 Jason Baxter discusses the great psychological subtlety in Dante’s Divine Comedy. (20 minutes) - How literature shaped Lewis —
FROM VOL. 155 Jason Baxter explains how reading medieval literature enabled C. S. Lewis to become a “naturalized citizen of the Middle Ages.” (25 minutes) - Mystery novels with theological concerns — In these interviews from 1993, mystery author P. D. James speaks about the philosophical and theological issues woven into her novels, and Alan Jacobs discusses James’s novel The Children of Men. (23 minutes)
- Modern fictional “heroes” —
FROM VOL. 141 Susanna Lee discusses moral authority in the heroes of hard-boiled crime fiction. (24 minutes) - Technophiliac obsessions —
FROM VOL. 141 Literary and media scholar Grant Wythoff talks about the “father of science fiction,” Hugo Gernsback. (26 minutes) - Ontology and reality in fiction — Katy Carl discusses Catholic novelist Graham Greene’s skill in portraying the struggle between spiritual belief and doubt. (27 minutes)
- Sacred and Profane Love: Graham Greene and the Catholic Imagination — Katy Carl discusses novelist Graham Greene’s fiction and spiritual struggles in light of the concept of the Catholic imagination. (49 minutes)
- Alert to the magic in the world — Junius Johnson discusses the importance of teaching stories, particularly fairy stories, in classical education. (25 minutes)
- Showing as meaning — Daniel McInerny on how the arts convey meaning
- Georges Bernanos & the Mystery of the Human Person — Translator J. C. Whitehouse praises French novelist Georges Bernanos’s profundity in exploring the depths of the human soul through the vehicle of fiction. (58 minutes)
- “A man after reality” —
FROM VOL. 30 Clyde Kilby discusses C. S. Lewis‘s critique of scientism and rationalism, and his belief in the primacy of the imagination. (15 minutes) - It takes a character (and a village) — Herbert McCabe, O.P. on the Aristotelian, Thomistic, and MacIntyrean account of the moral life
- The Transformed Vision of Samuel Taylor Coleridge — Poet Malcolm Guite explores the dramatic and even prophetic parallels between the life of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and that of the titular character in his famous poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” (59 minutes)
- The idiom for the revelation of mystery — Dana Gioia on the foundational place of poetry in Christian faith
- Breaking the frozen sea — Dana Gioia on how poetry enchants
- The importance of literary reading —
FROM VOL. 70 Dana Gioia discusses the important role literary reading plays in society and the 2004 publication from the NEA about such reading. (13 minutes) - Learning from experience — Flannery O’Connor on belief and experience
- Hillbilly Augustinian — Ralph Wood on Flannery O’Connor’s refusal to adapt her fiction to the national temper
- The grotesque and the transcendent — Christina Bieber Lake on why Flannery O’Connor’s readers have to work
- Ideas made incarnate — In this lecture, Karen Swallow Prior examines the power of great literature to shape lives, nourish imaginations, and develop a vision of the good life. (43 minutes)
- Insights into O’Connor’s development as a writer —
FROM VOL. 160 Jessica Hooten Wilson discusses her experience studying and organizing Flannery O’Connor’s unfinished third novel, Why Do the Heathen Rage? (27 minutes) - Discipline and piety — Bishop Robert Barron on Aquinas, the man
- St. Thomas the anthropologist — G. K. Chesterton on Aquinas’s complete Science of Man
- The collaboration of bodies and minds — F. C. Copleston on Aquinas’s confidence in the embodied nature of knowledge
- A brief for “prophetic Thomism” — David Decosimo on assuming a charitable posture toward pagan virtue
- Insights from St. Thomas’s biblical exegesis — Jason Paone explains how St. Thomas’s commentaries reveal the saint’s personality, his rhetorical flair, and the Christocentric vision that underlie all his work. (24 minutes)
- Economics and personhood —
FROM VOL. 147 Mary Hirschfeld argues that modern economics makes some fundamental assumptions about personhood, material goods, and God that prevent the development of a truly human understanding of economic life. (20 minutes) - Metaphysics and sub-creation —
FROM VOL. 144 Jonathan McIntosh claims that scholarship has tended to ignore the depth of St. Thomas Aquinas’s influence on J. R. R. Tolkien’s work. (28 minutes) - “A sign of contradiction” — In this lecture, Daniel Gibbons compares and contrasts understandings of sacramental poetics proposed by Augustine, Aquinas, and Sydney. (36 minutes)
- Knowing by heart — D. C. Schindler reflects on Plato’s idea of “conversion” in education, assuming the symbol of the heart as the center of man. (39 minutes)
- A prophetic “wake-up call” — In this 2024 lecture honoring the bicentennial of George MacDonald’s birth, Malcolm Guite explores MacDonald’s power to awaken readers’ spirits and effect in them a change of consciousness. (59 minutes)
- Perceiving truths that dazzle gradually — Rolland Hein on lessons from George MacDonald about the imagination as a spiritual faculty
- Foolishness, gravity, and the Church — In this essay, Albert L. Shepherd V explains why George MacDonald’s story “The Light Princess” is meant for “all who are childlike in faith and imagination.” (8 minutes)
- Victorian ideas about belief and doubt —
FROM VOL. 148 Timothy Larsen situates George MacDonald within a Victorian understanding of faith and doubt. (17 minutes) - Virgil and purposeful history — In this lecture from June 2019, classical educator Louis Markos examines Book II of The Aeneid to argue that Virgil had an eschatological view of history. (68 minutes)
- Bearing well the burdens of the past, present, and future — Louis Markos shows how great literature like the Iliad links us to the human story and strengthens us to live fully and well. (65 minutes)
- Immersion in a different time —
FROM VOL. 17 Literary critic Alan Jacobs considers the author Patrick O’Brian as perhaps the best historical novelist ever. (13 minutes) - Books worthy of a lifetime of encounters —
FROM VOL. 69 Daniel Ritchie discusses why great books programs survive mainly in Christian institutions while declining in secular ones. (13 minutes) - Literature for wisdom, not propaganda —
FROM VOL. 23 Daniel Ritchie provides a constructive alternative to the ideological captivity of literature and literary studies. (13 minutes)