Flannery
Conservative Catholics can't get enough of Flannery O'Connor. At First Things this week: Review/essay of Brad Gooch's Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor. Nicely done. Excerpt:
Gooch traces O'Connor's Southern Catholic pedigree and upbringing: her conception “in the shadow of the cathedral” of Savannah, Georgia, her over-nurturing at the hands of her socially-ambitious mother Regina, her prickly relationship with the nuns at her convent school, her now-famous attempts to “dirty the feathers” of her guardian angel. He notes as well the racially stratified society which was her lifelong context, the ubiquitous presence of black maids and farmhands, the people who came and went by back doors, or who did not enter the house at all, by unwritten law. He describes, in one striking instance, a party attended by the teenage “Mary Flannery,” at which the choir of the Ebenezer Baptist Church of Atlanta, directed by Martin Luther King, Sr. and including the ten-year-old Martin Luther King, Jr. performed costumed as slaves.
San Luis Potosi
A writer for The Atlantic describes his trip to Mexico's San Luis Potosi. It starts off great, but then fizzles to absolutely nothing. From the beginning:
In[Graham] Greene's time, San Luis Potosi was the lone holdout against the government's attempt to eliminate the Catholic church. Starting in 1917, the government of Mexico viewed the church as its rival for the affections of the Mexican people, and grew wary of the populist currents it appeared capable of mustering. By the 1930s, after a Catholic holy war, government forces had driven the clergy underground, except in San Luis Potosi, where a rebel leader, General Saturnino Cedillo, controlled the countryside until his killing in 1939.
(As promised earlier, blogging is slow this week.)
