Monday, October 1, 2007

WHY I LOVE FLANNERY O'CONNOR


Well, more than this, really. Yet here is a quote that is pure O'Connor, and describes her fiction writing very well:

"[The Christian fiction writer] is entirely free to observe. He feels no call to take on the duties of God or to create a new universe. He feels perfectly free to look at the one we already have and to show exactly what he sees. He feels no need to apologize for the ways of God to man or to avoid looking at the ways of man to God. For him, to ‘tidy up reality’ is certainly to succumb to the sin of pride."


This is taken from an "interview" Marvin Olasky of World Magazine does with one of O'Connor's books. Flannery O'Connor would be in her eighties if she were alive today, and probably scolding and shocking us as much now as she did then. If the above quote doesn't describe any Christian writer you've ever read, you ought to check out O'Connor. A Good Man Is Hard to Find would be a good start. Just don't go looking for any apologies, heheheh!



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2 comments:

Lutheran Lucciola said...

Hey, you changed your page look! Very clean now.

I like the dress she has on. Thanks for the mention of her stuff, I have never heard of her before.

Bruce Gee said...

Yeah, just wanted to see how the other half lives, heheh. I mean my page look. I took a shower, finally.

Give Flannery a try. A lot of pagans don't know she's a Christian when they read her.

My favorite line from one of her short stories: "That would have been a good woman if someone had held a gun to her head her whole life.." or something like that. Try THE RIVER also. All about baptism. Don't be afraid to think of her work as allegory: that's how she thought of it.

She also had a great line--she was a Catholic living in Georgia her whole life--to someone about that someone's opinion that the Eucharist was just a symbolic ceremony. Something like, "Well, if that's all it is, then to hell with it!"