Flannery O’Connor was a Roman Catholic novelist, essayist, and short story writer whose Complete Short Stories won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1972. Her fictional work explores existential questions of grace, morality, freedom, and transcendence in the lives of grotesque characters. Are humans free to determine the nature of reality or does reality (both spiritual and material) precede the human will and make a legitimate claim upon it? Is truth a construct erected by powerful people to sustain their own power; or is it a bedrock structure of being against which humans rebel at their own peril?
This Postmodern Realities episode is a conversation with Journal author Stephen Mitchell about his Volume 41 # 5 feature article “Flannery O’Connor and the Problem of Freedom.”
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Other articles and Postmodern Realities by this author:
Episode 135-Questing for Divine Love-Cormac McCarthy’s The Road
“Questing for Divine Love: Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.”
Episode 111 Humanity Crucified: Hemingway and the Human Condition
Humanity Crucified: Hemingway and the Human Condition
Episode 092 Literary Apologetics: Flannery O’Connor
Episode 045: Alexander Solzhenitsyn Confronts the Grand Inquisitor
Alexander Solzhenitsyn Confronts the Grand Inquisitor
Rejoicing over Owls: Thoreau and the Gift of Being
The Sting of Death: Albert Camus and the Fight for Life
Reading My Favorite Atheists: Ivan, Raskolnikov, and Kirilov