Flannery OConnor was an extraordinary author and a Catholic artist of profound depth and insight. Evidence for OConnors uniqueness is found in how popular her work has become among people who know little or nothing about grace, the sacraments, and the Incarnation realities that are central to stories filled with backwoods preachers, murderous ramblers, and tormented souls.
Stories help us make sense out of our lives. They can show us that our struggles and sufferings have meaning and help us make sense of morality. What kind of stories are we recommending then? Any and all kinds as long as they are animated by a sense of moral order.
I recall the first child I had to transfuse, a verb I kept hearing all the time a nine-year-old girl with leukemia who had more than an inkling that shed never celebrate another birthday. The girl died a month or so later, but during those few weeks her parents and she read and read, and did a lot of talking about what life means, and the manner in which one ought to live it an impressive kind of moral scrutiny on their part, under great duress. We are lucky indeed to have such stories as a great heritage, a moral reservoir of sorts, from which we may all constantly draw.
Reasonable Christian parents would not permit their children to read a series of enthralling books depicting likable young people involved in drug-dealing, or premarital sex, or torture. We would not give our children fiction in which a group of "good fornicators" struggled against a set of "bad fornicators." Why, then, have we accepted a set of books which glamorize and normalize occult activity, even though it is every bit as deadly to the soul as sexual sin, if not more so?
Goethes Faust is traditionally seen as a paean to and the epitome of German Idealism. According to this reading, Faust is the archetypal Modern Western Man who, by dint of his ceaseless striving, creates himself and his world by an act of sheer will. But this is not the only interpretation. In view of the lavish use of traditional Catholic themes and imagery which pervade the play, one is led to discover in Faust a more traditional view of man and the purpose of his life.
Siegfried Sassoon is arguably the greatest of the War Poets.
Catholic convert Joseph Pearce is author of two popular books on J.R.R. Tolkien, Tolkien: Man and Myth and Tolkien: A Celebration (both Ignatius Press). With the film release of Lord of the Rings scheduled for next month, Pearce mused about Tolkien (1892-1973) and his work in this interview with ZENIT.
Edith Sitwell was a shock-trooper of the poetic avant garde, a champion of modernity who revelled in the use of shock tactics to push the boundaries of poetry, angering traditionalists in the process.
A Scottish Congregational minister, George MacDonald was also a poet, a teacher, an editor, a lay theologian, and a writer of extraordinarily beautiful children's stories.
By the mid-1930s W. H. Auden was the most famous and most widely imitated young poet in England.
