Interestingly, my political conversion process began first. I was indeed hired as a leftist professor back in 1993. But my political foundation actually began to weaken just a few months before I got my doctorate. I had a friend named Jonathan Steckler who – along with his girlfriend Tiffany – was kidnapped and murdered by an armed assailant. The incident shook me so much that I went out and bought a handgun – thus ending my long-standing support of a national ban on handguns. Later that year, I was encouraged by a long-time family friend to watch The Silent Scream by Bernard Nathanson. That began the process of my conversion from pro-choice advocate to pro-life speaker. I now travel the country speaking in defense of the unborn.
The process of religious conversion began in 1996. I was doing a teaching exchange in Ecuador when an opportunity arose for me to visit a prison in Quito. The conditions of the prison were appalling. There were 45 prisoners stuffed in 36 square meter cells. Confessions were literally shocked out of suspects who had their testicles wired to car batteries. Guards admitted that prisoners were sometimes told they were free to go and then shot in the back as they walked out of the prison. All of these horrors shook me out of my old worldview, which suggested that morality is relative – and that we should never judge other cultures. I came to understand that there is an absolute moral law written on our hearts. We know what is right and true from seeing that which is evil. The shadow proves the sunshine. And if we are to embrace the objective truth of the moral law then we must acknowledge that there is a lawgiver. All of this led me to theism. And, of course, it led me to recognize that cultures lacking basic respect for the moral law are deserving of judgment. Those who refuse to judge other cultures would even lack a moral basis for liberating the Nazi concentration camps.
My conversion to Christianity was propelled by a visit I had on death row in Texas at the end of 1999. John Paul Penry, a mentally retarded rapist and murderer, quoted John 3:16 to me after I had interviewed him. I was ashamed that he had read the Bible and I had not – given that his IQ was once measured at 53. So I bought a copy, read it, and converted about nine months later. This goes to show that God can use anyone. Even a death row inmate with limited intellectual capacity. We all need to remember that when we are discouraged and feel we are limited by our past mistakes. (Read more.)
Please don't cancel Flannery O'Connor. From First Things:
The “recent” revelations Linnane mentions have a single source: an essay by Paul Elie, published in The New Yorker two weeks after American cities erupted in protests and violence over the killing of George Floyd. The essay—pointedly titled “How Racist Was Flannery O’Connor?”—takes O’Connor’s admirers to task for either excusing or ignoring the racist remarks and attitudes that appear in her personal correspondence.
I won’t bother criticizing Elie’s essay carefully, as scholars Amy Alznauer, Jerome C. Foss, and Jessica Hooten Wilson have already ably done so. Elie’s piece doesn’t offer much new information; he has merely brought O’Connor’s personal failures to national attention at a moment when racial tensions are especially high. Those of us who have bothered to assess the evidence (which has been available for some time) already knew that O’Connor was not free from the sin of racism. While she was committed in principle to integration and civil rights for black Americans, O’Connor admitted that by inclination she preferred the company of whites. In a particularly cringeworthy discussion of James Baldwin, she reveals a condescension toward black intellectuals that is disappointing. She sometimes used inexcusable racial slurs, in keeping with the customs of the racist culture she lived in—a culture she critiques and exposes in her fiction, but whose habits of speech and feeling she had internalized to some degree. Of course, we must confront O’Connor’s personal failures honestly. However, in the context of Catholic education, we must do this on Catholic rather than secular terms.
From a Catholic perspective, is the life and fiction of Flannery O’Connor still worth celebrating, in spite of the fact that she harbored some of the racist attitudes of her time and place? I believe that it is. As a devout Catholic, O’Connor knew that we are all marked by sin and therefore in need of God’s merciful grace. As a disabled woman in the male-dominated world of literature, she faced and overcame many challenges by placing the Eucharist at the center of her life. In her fiction, O’Connor reveals a vision of grace centered on the power of God’s love to break us out of our own complacency, in spite of our sins and our dispositions to sin. O’Connor wrote about the people her own culture had cast aside—the freaks, misfits, losers, and outcasts—and she was keen to show them in the fullness of their complex humanity, as equally created in the image of God and worthy of our attention. Her art reveals the truth that there is a powerful and ever-present temptation to resist, ignore, or distract ourselves from a reality that does not flatter us. Her fictional characters are comically ignorant of their own defects of soul, and need the violence of grace to reveal those defects to themselves in extraordinary and often painful ways. This human drama of sin, suffering, and redemption is powerful art because it is true to human life. (Read more.)
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