Thank you to the Temistic Institute and to the Catholic Information Center for hosting this.

Thank you all for coming.

So the title of my talk tonight comes from a remark made by Flannery O'Connor in one of her essays.

She says, the novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are

repugnant to him. And his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience

which is used to seeing them as natural. And he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to

this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do,

you can relax a little and use a more normal way of talking to it. When you have to assume that it does not,

then you have to make your vision apparent by shock.

To the heart of hearing, you shout,

and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.

Anyone who's read any of O'Connor's fiction will have a sense of what she means

by large and startling figures. Hermaphrodite circus freaks, prosthetics stealing Bible salesmen,

atheist prophets, and so forth. Likewise, readers will know how she seeks to shock. Sweet or

maybe not so sweet. Grandmothers are shot by serial killers. Errogant young sophisticates

contract illnesses that confine them for life to their childhood homes,

and respectable land-owning white ladies get themselves gourd in the chest by someone else's bull.

Wikipedia notes, presumably for the sake of students, searching for the meaning of that last story,

some writers suggest that the bull symbolizes Christ.

Okay. story, some writers suggest that the bull symbolizes Christ. But O'Connor's reasons for populating her stories with such startling figures in such horrific

plot turns might not be so apparent. Many of her initial readers mistook her for a nihilistic misanthrope,

who crafted the most unappealing possible characters and gave them the most horrible outcomes

...