No One Was Paying Any Attention to the Sky

Although Flannery O'Connor is famously known as the "hillbilly Thomist," her love of the medieval did not take the form of a nostalgic refuge from the modern. O'Connor's vision of modernity relied heavily on three twentieth century thinkers who had a profound influence on her view of modernity: Romano Guardini, Étienne Gilson, and Gabriel Marcel. Ference walks us through four major problems Flannery O'Connor finds in the modern world: the self as center of existence, a disregard for mystery, a general distrust of the concrete, and the subordination of reason. Ference brings these four problems and three thinkers to bear on O'Connor's weird and wonderful first novel, Wise Blood, helping us to make sense of a strange book and, by extension, the estranged world we all now inhabit. 

"Father Ference (like O'Connor) excels at explaining complex ideas succinctly for non-specialists. You may not be familiar with some of the philosophers who shaped O'Connor's thinking, and whom Father Ference explores here; others-Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza-will be more familiar. Regardless, you will come away from this work with a deeper understanding of the intellectual framework undergirding O'Connor's art and her protests against modernity. Ference's keen concluding analysis of her first novel, Wise Blood, makes clear that O'Connor's interest in philosophy was more than dilettantism: she melded it seamlessly into her creative vision."

-Christopher Scalia