Mankind was her business …

… A Good Woman Is Hard to Figure — Crisis Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The Catholic writer who sees Christ in everything, who is concerned with truth, and who does not avoid getting a little dirt on her hands writing about the world as it is, this writer will see sin as sin, will write it true, and will draw unattractive characters because they are unattractive. A teenage girl calling a good Christian woman a warthog from hell, a wife who beats the image of Christ tattooed on her husband’s back, a woman who watches in silence while her hired man—her savior—is crushed by a tractor—these are human figures wrenched out of the shape God formed them to take. Sin is ugly, there is no getting around that, and a character whose habit is sin will be rightly painted ugly, twisted, grotesque. It is a difficult task to tell the truth about ugliness without being preachy, and only the most accomplished imagination, one that breathes through the goodness of art, could do it. Flannery O’Connor’s was this kind of imagination.