"“While the South is hardly Christ-centered,” Flannery O’Connor memorably declared
in 1960 on the college lecture circuit, “it is most certainly Christ-haunted. The
Southerner, who isn’t convinced of it, is very much afraid that he may have been
formed in the image and likeness of God. Ghosts can be very fierce and instructive.
They cast strange shadows.”1 A Catholic in a regional sea of Protestants, a single
woman in a patriarchal culture, a writer and intellectual living on a farm in rural
Georgia, O’Connor in these remarks tersely and brilliantly evoked something elemental
about the mid-20th century South: that its denizens—women and men, rich
and poor, black and white—couldn’t imagine themselves in wholly secular, “modern”
categories; they were shaped in indelible ways by theological imagination
and longings for sacred reality. The South’s public square, as a basic consequence,
was noticeably not “naked,” but clothed in all sorts of ways by the traces and trappings
of religion, specifically Protestant Christianity."(...
