“Would it not be impossible for us to avoid evangelizing if the Gospel is in our skin, our hands, our hearts, and our heads? We are indeed obliged to say why we are trying to be what we want to be, and trying not to be what we don’t want to be…Clearly we have to […]
FLANNERY O’CONNOR
WHY STUDY ATHEISM?

I am glad you see the belief in [my stories] because it is there. The truth is my stories have been watered and fed by Dogma. I am a Catholic (not because it’s advantageous to my writing but because I was born and brought up one) and at some point in my life I realized […]
FLANNERY O’CONNOR: A WRITER OF UNCOMMON GRACE

The Easter Season seems a fitting time to pay tribute to the American short story writer and novelist Flannery O’Connor. O’Connor (1925-1964) was an only child who grew up in Savannah, Georgia, and whose father died of lupus. As a young woman she studied at the prestigious Iowa Workshop. On the verge of a promising […]
CRAFTING

I have become a“crafter!” It all started with what I hoped to be the cost-saving measure of making rubber-stamp Christmas cards last year (which ended up setting me back about 250 bucks) and from there went on to knitting, curtain-making, several dinner parties, and now I’m thinking maybe I will try my hand at a […]
THE ABBESS OF ANDALUSIA

The Abbess of Andalusia, by Lorraine V. Murray, about the letters and life of Flannery O’Connor, moves, mystifies, and inspires. The intro by Joseph Pearce is first-rate: “It is the suffering of God Himself,” for example, “that makes sense of all suffering, and it is through Christ’s suffering that Christians find meaning and purpose in their […]