Tag

Flannery O’Connor

Blog

Wingless Chickens

The great Georgian writer of the mid-twentieth century Flannery O’Connor famously described herself as a “hillbilly Thomist,” a nod both to her Southern origins and her dedication to the medieval theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas. However much yankee intellectuals thumbed their noses at the South, the hillbilly moniker was not a little discordant given the well-educated O’Connor hailed from a…
Casey Chalk
May 1, 2024
Blog

A Good Southerner is Hard to Find

Perhaps it was after watching yet another film depicting the South as irredeemably backwards and bigoted. Or perhaps it was after reading yet another round of commentaries denigrating Robert E. Lee because Lee was a traitor (so were the American revolutionaries, technically), a defender of a slave owning society (as most societies were before the nineteenth century), and ultimately a…
Casey Chalk
September 21, 2021
Blog

Hillbilly Thomists

What would you give in exchange for your soul? Bluegrass greats Bill Monroe and Doc Watson asked that question in one of their most memorable live recordings. It’s also the same one posed by Fr. Thomas Joseph White, O.P., on one of the tracks of the first album released by the Hillbilly Thomists, a bluegrass band of Dominican friars from…
Casey Chalk
February 8, 2021
Review Posts

The Graces of Flannery O’Connor

A review of Good Things Out of Nazareth: The Uncollected Letters of Flannery O'Connor and Friends (Convergent Books, 2019) edited by Benjamin Alexander. One of the more agreeable and important books about literature to emerge recently is Good Things Out of Nazareth: The Uncollected Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Friends, edited by Benjamin Alexander who recently retired from teaching literature…
Henry T. Edmonson III
May 5, 2020
Blog

Why Flannery O’Connor Never Liked Yankees

YANKEE, n. In Europe, an American. In the Northern States of our Union, a New Englander. In Southern States the word is unknown. (seeDAMYANK.) Ambrose Bierce, THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY (1906). Bierce's definition of the Yankee is a bit outdated. No doubt some Southerners still refer to Northerners, especially New Yorkers and New Englanders, as Damyanks, but no one can say…
Michael Jordan
April 24, 2017