On June 3rd, Dappled Things had the pleasure of co-sponsoring a webinar hosted by the Ars Vivendi program of the Collegium Institute for Catholic Thought and Culture, of which we are now a part. The event was a huge success, drawing close to one thousand attendees. For all those who wish they could have attended but missed it, you can find the whole video below. As an extra bonus for those who watch, the Collegium Institute will cover 25% of a Dappled Things subscription for any who use the coupon code mentioned my our Editor-in-Chief. Enjoy!
Loved the overall Flannery O’Connor seminar, but I wish that at least one of the panel had been a Southern liberal who had been alive in 1964 instead of four young enough to be my daughters, they might have had more insight. One at least had the good sense to realize that O’Connor is aware of and conflicted by her own imperfections. Like Paul Elie in his wonderful look at Catholic writers Connor, Day, Percy and Merton, they couldn’t understand some of the pre-woke attitudes of a child of the deep South. She is from a part of Georgia where one of my own ancestors was upset 20 years after the civil war and after Reconstruction was still upset that another ancestor, an Irish immigrant woman, gained possession of the family slaves in an estate battle in the 1850s. One can grow up, and I and O’Connor did, seeing something wrong with the closed society white Southern racism, and still be a few years away from understanding that black jokes were not funny. A big step for me was Parriis Island and black bunkmates to understand just how wrong much of what I grew up with was–and was intolerable. I suspect had O’Connor had lived as long as Eudora Welty she would have been PC enough to be horrified, like the son on the bus (was she putting herself in the role of the white mother) as his own presumption. I remember when my father, whose own mother was a school teacher in Milledgeville for a while, gave me a collection of her short stories and Wise Blood around the time O’Connor died. He said she deserved the Nobel Prize. I had an amazing discovery, being myself a rare Catholic the the Mississippi Baptist State. It would do some folks well to take a time machine trip to better understand this frail (physically only) supporter of Martin Luther King.