Grace Upon Grace is the new book of sermons from David Johnson, a great friend of Mockingbird’s here in Charlottesville, VA. You may have heard some of his sermons on our Resources page, or had the pleasure of listening to his talk on parenting at our conference this past Fall. This particular collection spans topics from all the “personal matters” of life: parents and kids, wives and husbands, money matters and big decisions, corporate ladders and childhood mistakes. In doing so, Dr. Johnson brings the heart of the gospel into the common corners of our daily lives–but not without first…
Short Story Wednesdays: “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor
Welcome back! This week for our new short story series, we turn to Flannery O’Connor’s popular and much-anthologized “A Good Man is Hard to Find” – the story of a family vacation gone awry. You can read along by clicking here.
Have you heard the one about the family driving to Florida? Grandmother’s vanity leads to a car accident in South Georgia, they run into an outlaw called the Misfit, and he kills them all. Flannery O’Connor found stories like this deeply comical, and at the same time as serious as anything in the world.
It’s safe to say she was the…
The Gospel According to Hoosiers, Part 1: The Brutality of Judgment and the End of Chasing
There’s no question that Hoosiers is the best sports movie ever made ever, period. While I’m slightly biased, the film actually appears on most sports movie “top 10” or “greatest” lists. The incredible soundtrack and Gene Hackman’s sweet leather jacket are not the only reasons I adore the film. The ways in which the inevitable themes of judgment and grace are made manifest are what really make me love it.
The film’s protagonist, Norman Dale (Gene Hackman) is the newly hired varsity basketball coach at Hickory High school in Hickory, Indiana. Coach Dale is hired (seemingly as a merciful favor) by Hickory High’s…
Every Minute of Her Life: Flannery O’Connor Has an Epiphany (or Three…Thousand)
I haven’t read anything by Jim Shepard but man, that’s going to change. His seasonally appropriate rumination on Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” that appeared on The Atlantic last week is just so deeply encouraging. He articulates O’Connor’s crucial insight about how/why people change with such humility and precision, i.e the notion that conversions are not a one-time thing–far from it–but that that doesn’t make them any less real or good. His observation about the relative impotence of information is also pretty striking, both as it relates to life in general and literature in specific. To…
Is Contemporary Literature Post-Christian?
An essay in last week’s NYTimes written by Paul Elie grabbed my attention, prodded me in the gut, and provoked some mixed reactions on my behalf. Written with a sensitivity to the oft-referenced ‘post-Christian society,’ Elie surmises that contemporary American fiction lacks the believer: “In American fiction, belief is like that. Belief as upbringing, belief as social fact, belief as a species of American weirdness: our literary fiction has all of these things. All that is missing is the believer.”
His argument and epistolatory tone largely stem from an understanding that a large swath of American literature has been overtly rooted in…
Flannery O’Connor on Emotional Jellyfish and the Repulsiveness of Truth (and Incarnation)
From the collection of her letters, The Habit of Being, pgs 99-100, ht WH:
I can never agree with you that the Incarnation, or any truth, has to satisfy emotionally to be right (and I would not agree that for the natural man the Incarnation does not satisfy emotionally). It does not satisfy emotionally for the person brought up under many forms of false intellectual discipline such as nineteenth century mechanism, for instance. Leaving the Incarnation aside, the very notion of God’s existence is not emotionally satisfactory anymore for great numbers of people, which does not mean the God ceases to exist.…
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Another Week Ends: Jewish Anxiety, Christian Juvenilia, Male Demise, Cheap Law, Underachievement and Imperfection, Bearded Brooklyn, Ram and Beach Boys
1. “Do The Jews Own Anxiety?” asked Daniel Smith in The NY Times last week, and his answer may surprise you. A member of the tribe himself, Smith traces the public (gentile) perception of Jewish neurosis, as well as how its poster-boys (Woody Allen, Philip Roth’s Alexander Portnoy, etc) have almost gleefully perpetuated the stereotype, and managed to eclipse such once well-known non-Jewish neurotics such as Soren Kierkegaard, Emily Dickinson, Ingmar Bergman and William James in anxious notoriety — to say nothing of our favorite “patient of great significance,” Dr. Luther! My own experience would be that those whose neuroses…
Catch a Cannonball (to Take Me on Down the Line): In Memory of Levon Helm
The Mockingbird office in Charlottesville is decorated with a collection of proud mementos. An inspiration constellation, if you will. Most prominently, there’s the foldout from the ET: Picture Book record, which has Michael Jackson posing for what seems like a school photo with the ExtraTerrestrial himself. There’s the 7-inch Slash figurine, complete with adjoining Marshall stack. There’s the framed original poster for The Muppet Movie. There’s the bottom piece of Lucas Cranach’s Marienkirche altarpiece in Wittenberg, which depicts Martin Luther preaching the crucified God. There’s the six-panel insert to All Things Must Pass of George Harrison looking like the haggard…
Flannery O’Connor on the Storyteller, the Cost, and the Listener
From her book of occasional prose, Mystery and Manners. An essay entitled “The Grotesque in Southern Fiction.”
And what [the reader/listener/congregant] needs, of course, is to be lifted up. There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted and lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he…
White Trash, Freaks, Lunatics, God and Mrs. Turpin
The following excerpt comes from Flannery O’Connor’s short story entitled ‘Revelation’, which is found in her collection Everything That Rises Must Converge. I stumbled upon it by way of a sermon by Tim Keller, and my, what a gem! Toward the end of the tale the main character, Mrs. Turpin, a religious person in the Pharisaical sense, is caught up in the whirlwind of emotion that is her own abreaction. Turpin has been cut to the quick by the unsettling realization that, quite unlike herself, God cherishes the weak and foolish things of the world. O’Connor welcomes the…
Flannery O’Connor on Freaks (FOC pt III)
Three more quotes, all of which can be found in her excellent, excellent essay collection “Mystery And Manners”. For the other two installments, go here and then here.
“Whenever I’m asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological. That is a large statement, and it is dangerous to make it, for almost…
Three More From Flannery O’Connor (Plus One)
From her essay, “The Regional Writer”:
“When Walker Percy won the National Book Award, newsmen asked him why there were so many good Southern writers and he said, ‘Because we lost the War.’ He didn’t mean by that simply that a lost war makes good subject matter. What he was saying was that we have had our Fall. We have gone into the modern world with an inburnt knowledge of human limitations and with a sense of mystery which could not have developed in our first state of innocence – as it has not sufficiently developed in the rest of our…
The Action of Grace in a Territory Held Largely by the Devil: Flannery O’Connor’s Mystery And Manners
As devastating as her fiction is, I find that the volume of Flannery O’Connor’s I return to most often is the collection of essays and speeches, Mystery and Manners. It is a glimpse behind the curtain of the highest order, in which the great author spells out not only some of her most deeply held theological convictions, but her literary ones as well – and how they inform each other. She does this, of course, with the sort of insight and personal integration, not to mention gift for language, that could only have come, well, from God. Her aesthetic approach,…
hespenshied: ditto what Karen said.........I understand the SportsCenter habit, tho...
Melissa: Thank you so much!...
Carey: This visit with Christian Wiman was indeed a reverberating gift. Than...
David Zahl: Affirmative! Download here: http://www.mbird.com/resources/?sermon_id...
karen: Nick: I have thoroughly enjoyed reading your columns/posts at MB. Than...