Flannery O'Connor and the Church Made Visible

Ralph Wood has kindled the enthusiasm of generations of students for unashamedly theological reading of fiction. Now Wood puts dear, clear-eyed Flannery O’Connor in conversation and argument with intellectuals and artists from Willa Cather to Cardinal Newman and Thomas Aquinas. In her stories and letters, Flannery O’Connor, bolstered by her Catholic faith, fearlessly, raucously told the truth about the nihilism lurking behind cheerful, optimistic, liberal, Enlightenment America. Refusing to trim the cosmic, countercultural claims of Christianity to the limits of modern imagination, Flannery told some blisteringly truthful stories. Now, in this book, Ralph Wood tells the truth about why O’Connor continues to matter.

~Will Willimon, Professor of the Practice of Christian Ministry, Duke University

In these essays, the culmination of a lifetime of thinking about Flannery O’Connor, Ralph Wood considers how O’Connor's achievement is almost unprecedented within the larger context of American literature. In a culture that has drunk deeply of the Enlightenment and its idolatry of the nation-state--and in the process has done more to erode Christianity within the United States than overt hostility could have done--Wood lauds O’Connor for the cold eye that she casts on American exceptionalism and for her stubborn, hard-won testimony that the visible Church still endures. Heartfelt, erudite, often provocative, and unafraid to challenge the sentimental yet nihilistic pieties of our current moment,  Flannery O’Connor and the Church Made Visible confirms just how formidable, timely, and indispensable Wood’s contributions to O’Connor scholarship remain.

~Thomas F. Haddox, Lindsay Young Professor of English, University of Tennessee

Perhaps I find this book so compelling because Ralph Wood's story matches my own: Flannery O'Connor made the Church visible to me. Wood places O'Connor in the choir with Bonhoeffer, John Henry Newman, Willa Cather, and others, to show that what America needs is not a Christian politics but a living, redeemed, and ready-to-pay-the-cost Church.

~Jessica Hooten Wilson, Fletcher Jones Chair of Great Books, Pepperdine University