O'Connor believed that one breathed in the air of disbelief.

I believe she said it was disbelief combined with attraction for the holy.

They weren't content to settle in that place and say,

this is my lot or this is the lot of our time.

They're hunger for something more, for something deeper,

was so strong that they made that unbelief for disbelief.

A starting point and then a continual testing ground for their religious convictions.

Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy.

Paul Eli made a pilgrimage into the echoing lives of these 20th century figures

and how they resonate in Catholicism and culture even now.

Day was a Bohemian writer who founded the Catholic worker newspaper

as well as shelters and soup kitchens.

Percy was a New Orleans physician who left medicine to write fiction.

Merton was a pleasure seeking sophisticated who became a trappist monk

and revered spiritual author.

O'Connor was an eccentric deeply gifted southern writer.

Alone among them, Flannery O'Connor was born Catholic.

The other three converted as adults embarking on a new life

that they had first discovered in books.

I'm Christa Tippett and this is on being.

Paul Eli is a senior fellow with Georgetown University's Berkeley Center

for religion, peace, and world affairs.

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