All is Grace: Georges Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest

Join us for our June online Global Catholic Literature Seminar on Georges Bernanos’s The Diary of a Country Priest. Bernanos’s classic novel is a powerful reflection on the trials, boredom, and grace of a priest in rural France. The novel, written as a diary of a struggling and increasingly sick cleric, is a masterpiece of French Catholic literature and provides a different lens through which to envision global Catholic literature. Faced by the bitterness, world-weariness, and arrogance of his many parishioners. The young priest tries to find and express grace in a world that seems to have lost any sense of it.

In this seminar, we will explore the text’s depictions of the difficulties of religious life in the modern world but also how hard it is to live out a transcendent orientation in the midst of the mundane. In considering the novel we will explore a variety of questions. How are the vocations and challenges of priest and laity both distinct and overlapping? How can they be illuminated through literature? To what extent can grace emerge out of the mundane and quotidian? How can fiction depict suffering and help us to be transformed through it?

George Bernanos was born in 1888. He was a devout Catholic and major figure in the French Catholic renaissance of the interwar period. He died in 1948. 

Our first presenter, Raymond MacKenzie, is professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota with an expertise in modern French literature especially Bernanos and Mauriac. Natalie Morrill, our second presenter, is a novelist and Dappled Thing’s fiction editor. She published her first novel The Ghost Keeper in 2018. Our final presenter is Trevor Merrill, a novelist and literary theorist. His novel Minor Indignities was published in 2020.

Schedule and Presenters: 

We will gather on Zoom on Mondays in June from 7:00pm-8:30pm ET

• 6/6 Raymond MacKenzie - Pages 1-63 Chapters 1-2

• 6/13 Natalie Morrill - Pages 64-139 Chapters 3-4

• 6/20 Trevor Merrill - Pages 140-220 Chapters 5-6

• 6/27 Closing discussion led by Terence Sweeney  -   Pages 221-298 Chapters 7-8

Registration Fees & Deadlines:

Dappled Things Promo Code: DappledThingsGB

Early Bird Registration ends Wednesday, May 11: $65

Regular Registration ends Tuesday, May 31: $75