Rereading Flannery O’Connor’s wonderful book, “Mystery & Manners: Occasional Prose,” selected and edited by Sally and Robert Fitzgerald (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1957, 237 pp.) has helped me to appreciate anew the gift that talented novelists are to us. I have difficulty understanding some of O’Connor’s short stories but I accept the judgment of others who know more about literature than I do.

I have found reflecting on some of the insights of author Flannery O’Connor very helpful in trying to understand the relationship between good stories and religious faith.

I am wondering how many readers of this weekly column have a strong sense that they are writing the stories of their lives by the free choices they make. To be more accurate, I would say they are co-creating their stories with God by the free choices they make.  In his book “What Is God? […]

As I mentioned in last week’s column, my favorite American playwright is Eugene O’Neill. In a letter, probably written in 1925, O’Neill expressed what he was trying to do with his dramas. He wrote that he wanted “to see the transfiguring nobility of tragedy, in as much near the Greek sense as one can grasp it, in seemingly the most ignoble, debased lives. And just here is where I am a most confirmed mystic, for I’m always trying to interpret Life in terms of character. 

Anyone who reads this column regularly knows that I frequently write about the philosophy of secular humanism. At St. John’s University, in every course I teach I begin the course with two or three lectures explaining secular humanism. I think that the predominant view of reality in our society among many intellectuals is secular humanism. 

In my previous five columns I have been trying to promote great literature and other arts and to comment on how they can be a great help in the life of a religious believer.

I have been reading a wonderful book entitled “Western Civilization: A Global Comparative Approach: Volume II: Since 1600” (New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group, 2012). I wanted to read an intellectual history, a book that would relate historical events with what was going on in philosophy and other liberal arts when those historical events were happening. 

Writing this series of columns on art and religious faith has helped me to appreciate art in a new way. The importance of the artistic vocation boggles my mind. In a previous column in this series I made a distinction between two types of judgment that might be made about a work of art.

I came across a statement by Mark Van Doren that I hope will shed light on what I am trying to emphasize in this series of columns on art and its relation to religious faith. Van Doren was a professor at Columbia University and was something of a legend as a professor. 

It is fascinating to me that this series of columns on the relationship between faith and the arts has turned out to be a delightful trip down memory lane.