Friday Links
April 4, 2025
Nicodemus Visiting Jesus by Henry Ossawa Tanner
The enduring legacy of Flannery O’Connor at 100
Undaunted Joy: The Revolutionary Act of Cultivating Delight
Edna O’Brien’s Real Feminine Mystique
James Matthew Wilson on Dana Gioia, Enchanter-Poet
The Trump Administration Must Defend Syria’s Christians
“Like a Western Suit that Doesn’t Fit” Shusaku Endo, Christianity, and Japan
Fascist Apologetics and the Memoirs of an Anti-Semite
The enduring legacy of Flannery O’Connor at 100
Here’s an interview with Fr. Damian Ference about his visit to Milledgeville to celebrate her 100th birthday. Fr. Ference and Pedro Estava consider O’Connor’s work, her legacy, and more:
This year marks the 100th birthday of the legendary Catholic writer Flannery O’Connor. Her hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia, drew admirers from all over to take part in the festivities, which included a cake and a ‘Dress Like Flannery’ contest. Writers from all over came to her grave to place their pens, described Fr Damian Ference, Vicar for Evangelisation for the Diocese of Cleveland and author of Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist. He said he celebrated Mass at her home parish, Sacred Heart, in a conversation we had discussing O’Connor’s enduring significance—both as an artist and in the realm of evangelisation. As the Church navigates this era of secularisation, he emphasised that her work is as vital as ever. Her centennial birthday provides an opportunity to reflect on how her life and work serve as a model for women, the faithful, and artists alike.
Undaunted Joy: The Revolutionary Act of Cultivating Delight
Shemaiah Gonzalez’s forthcoming book on how to find joy in a fallen world is forthcoming from Zondervan. In the meantime, if you pre-order the book, you’ll receive some gifts, including a preview of the first chapter and a fun Spotify playlist. All the information is in the link.
Edna O’Brien’s Real Feminine Mystique
I’m not sure I agree with the entirety of this essay, but Judge raises some interesting points and I’m glad to see anyone considering O’Brien’s work. She was polarizing in Ireland, certainly, but she was a great writer and her work is worth reading and considering. This essay does remind me once again, though, that ideological frameworks are probably not the best way to understand literature as literature.
The reason is that Edna O’Brien was too brilliant, too expansive, and too wise to be shoehorned into feminism’s dreary dogmatism. Her influences were not Betty Friedan and Andrea Dworkin, but Joyce, Hemingway and T.S. Eliot. In a conversation with Philip Roth in 1984, who called O’Brien “the most gifted woman now writing fiction in English,” she said: “Love replaced religion for me in my sense of fervor. When I began to look for earthly love (i.e., sex), I felt that I was cutting myself off from God.”
James Matthew Wilson on Dana Gioia, Enchanter-Poet
Wilson reviews Dana Gioia’s collection of essays Poetry as Enchantment. He also gives a mini-primer on Gioia’s criticism. You’ll want to make time for this one, friends:
His critical books conform, in general, to a pattern: each of them appears as a major intervention in contemporary culture buttressed by a series of secondary but related concerns. This was the case with his first critical volume, Can Poetry Matter?, whose title essay has managed to stay controversial despite having been published long ago in 1991, and it is the case with his sixth, published now in his seventy-fourth year. The Gioia form is to feature a long, important title essay; several tangentially related, more modest essays; and a series of brief reviews and short reflections, all culled from the sundry freelance work of the writer but ordered such that a unified impression is achieved.
The Trump Administration Must Defend Syria’s Christians
Luma Simms writes on the possibility of hope for Syrian Christians that the Trump Administration offers. I pray it is so for our Syrian Christian brothers and sisters, and for all of the Christians who suffer around the world for their faith. We Americans too often, and to easily, forget about them.
Unlike the majority of Christians in the United States, Middle Eastern Christians are not going to live relatively peaceful lives. It’s true that our culture hates us, scorns Christian morality, and desires to usher in an age of the anti-good. After all, we are not greater than our master; we should expect the hatred of the world. Yet, the Christians of the Middle East have lived, and continue to live, in acute suffering, enduring hard and soft persecutions that we Americans cannot comprehend.
“Like a Western Suit that Doesn’t Fit” Shusaku Endo, Christianity, and Japan
Nadya Williams with a really interesting look at a newly published collection of the great Japanese writer Shūsaku Endō’s work:
In his most famous novel Silence, published in 1966 and adapted by Martin Scorsese in 2016, Japanese Catholic writer Shūsaku Endō (1932-1996) follows the stories of seventeenth century Jesuit missionaries in Japan amid brutal persecution. At the end, the missionaries seem to fall into despair, failing to convert others and even losing faith themselves. What should we make of such stories, particularly considering Endō’s own experience as a Roman Catholic in Japan?
Though Silence, being set in the 1600s, seems primarily to be a historical novel, the newly published collection of Endō’s works, Portraits of a Mother, suggest Silence is far more autobiographical than it appears.
Fascist Apologetics and the Memoirs of an Anti-Semite
Another excellent episode of Manifesto! A Podcast from Jacob Siegel and Phil Klay. In this one, they “discuss David Jones 1939 essay on Hitler, courtesy of Thomas Dilworth's "David Jones and Fascism," alongside Gregor von Rezzori's "Troth," from his Memoirs of an Anti-Semite.”
