Everything in man is at the service of the anonymous monster.
Christophobia is resentment against the Gospel. It is the spiritual essence of the demoniacal racism of our pagan world.
Jacques Maritain, Ransoming the Time
A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.
H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America
We no longer live in a modern era, but in a new Middle Ages whose characteristics we cannot yet make out.
... the universe and our experience in it is a text that we must learn to read if we are to come to the truth of it and of ourselves.
The circumstances of the pilgrim are everyone's and their appeal, on a mythic level, is inexhaustible: we all awak lost in the wood; the world darkens for each of us; we descend, we grope through moral uncertainty, we look to be lifted.
Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacoff, (ed) The Poet's Dante
I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn't convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God.
Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners
Alienation was once a diagnosis, but in much of the fiction of our time it has become an ideal. The modern hero is the outsider. His experience is rootless. He can go anywhere. He belongs nowhere. Being alien to nothing, he ends up being alienated from any kind of community based on common tastes and interests. The borders of is country are the sides of his skull.
The South is traditionally hostile to outsiders, except on her own terms. She is tradiionally against intruders, foreigners from Chicago or New Jersey, all those who come from afar with moral energy that increases in direct proportion to the distance from home. It is difficult to separate the virtues of this quality from the narrowness which accompanies and colors it for the outside world. It is more difficult still to reconcile the South's instinct to preserve her identity with her equal instinct to fall eager victim to every poisonous breath from Hollywood or Madison Avenue. But good and evil appear to be joined in every culture at the spine, and as far as the creation of a body of fiction is concerned, the social is superior to the purely personal. Somewhere is better than anywhere. And traditional manners, however unbalanced, are better than no manners at all.
Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners
We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech. .... An idiom characterizes a society, and when you ignore the idiom, you are very likely ignoring the whole social fabric that could make a meaningful chaacter. ... Our history lives in our talk.
Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners
A God without wrath brought men without sin into a Kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a Cross.
H. Richard Niebuhr, The Kingdom of God in America
... the universe and our experience in it is a text that we must learn to read if we are to come to the truth of it and of ourselves.
The circumstances of the pilgrim are everyone's and their appeal, on a mythic level, is inexhaustible: we all awak lost in the wood; the world darkens for each of us; we descend, we grope through moral uncertainty, we look to be lifted.
I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly Christ-centered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The Southerner, who isn't convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been formed in the image and likeness of God.
Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners
Alienation was once a diagnosis, but in much of the fiction of our time it has become an ideal. The modern hero is the outsider. His experience is rootless. He can go anywhere. He belongs nowhere. Being alien to nothing, he ends up being alienated from any kind of community based on common tastes and interests. The borders of is country are the sides of his skull.
The South is traditionally hostile to outsiders, except on her own terms. She is tradiionally against intruders, foreigners from Chicago or New Jersey, all those who come from afar with moral energy that increases in direct proportion to the distance from home. It is difficult to separate the virtues of this quality from the narrowness which accompanies and colors it for the outside world. It is more difficult still to reconcile the South's instinct to preserve her identity with her equal instinct to fall eager victim to every poisonous breath from Hollywood or Madison Avenue. But good and evil appear to be joined in every culture at the spine, and as far as the creation of a body of fiction is concerned, the social is superior to the purely personal. Somewhere is better than anywhere. And traditional manners, however unbalanced, are better than no manners at all.
Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners
We in the South live in a society that is rich in contradiction, rich in irony, rich in contrast, and particularly rich in its speech. .... An idiom characterizes a society, and when you ignore the idiom, you are very likely ignoring the whole social fabric that could make a meaningful chaacter. ... Our history lives in our talk.
Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners
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