Synopsis:
This book attempts a close reading of the fiction of Flannery OConnor, story by story, with one eye on her use of the Bible, and her view of the Bible in relation to her own work. After introductory chapters on OConnors markings in her own Roman Catholic Bible, her book reviews in diocesan newspapers, and her impatience with her wayward readers, Michaels looks first at her two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, and then at seventeen of her short stories from her two collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything That Rises Must Converge. Michaels takes notice...

Essays on Modernity covers a wide range of topics, but the essential thesis remains the same throughout; contemporary Western society has abandoned the permanent things of tradition in favor of fleeting pleasures, self-worship, and the secular rationalizations that justify them. But the West is by no means doomed. It can survive and thrive if its citizens can only recover what they chose to lose: their pursuit of truth and beauty, their academic rigor and intellectual integrity, their Christian morals and mores. If these essays share a theme it is the critical relation between an idea or...

Essays on Modernity covers a wide range of topics, but the essential thesis remains the same throughout; contemporary Western society has abandoned the permanent things of tradition in favor of fleeting pleasures, self-worship, and the secular rationalizations that justify them. But the West is by no means doomed. It can survive and thrive if its citizens can only recover what they chose to lose: their pursuit of truth and beauty, their academic rigor and intellectual integrity, their Christian morals and mores. If these essays share a theme it is the critical relation between an idea or...