Dear Editor: As a retired high school English teacher, I am always intently focused on the weekly commentaries of Father Robert Lauder. His “Forming Conscience Thought Catholic Novels”(Nov. 10) brought back memories of my readings of Flannery O’Connor.

I was very fortunate to teach a course on the short story in my career. And it was my teaching of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” that underscored the concern with man’s life and death spiritual struggle. Father Lauder’s article imitates this conception. The protagonist’s rebelling against belief forces a crisis that reveals the misconception of reality.

Thus, most of O’Connor’s characters experience what she calls “moments of grace.”

JOHN SCIBELLI

Rosedale

 

Dear Editor: Father Robert Lauder’s column “Reading and Religious Faith” (Oct. 6) states “How reading great literature might help people religiously.”

In his famous autobiography, “The Seven Storey Mountain,” Thomas Merton wrote: “While reading James Joyce, always in the background was the Church and its priests and its devotions; the Catholic life fascinated me … What did the Jesuits do? How did a priest live his life?”

When Merton entered the Trappist Monastery to study for the priesthood (1942), the Novice Master introduced him as: “Here is a man who was converted to the Catholic faith by reading James Joyce.”

BROTHER ED KENT, O.S.F.

Via email