Quite a group …

… Flannery O‘Connor and Friends, Revisited | George Weigel | First Things. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Above all, Good Things Out of Nazareth—Gordon’s biblical metaphor for the Southern literary renaissance, which Dr. Alexander adopts for his title—is a powerful reminder of the intensity of Flannery O’Connor’s Catholic faith: an intensity that was unmarked by sentimentality, that was informed by an astonishingly broad reading in the Fathers of the Church and St. Thomas Aquinas, and that sustained her through many dark nights of the soul, both literary and physical. At the end, that is the deepest impression her letters leave: Here is a woman of extraordinary courage whose configuration of her life to the Cross was a source of both personal strength and literary genius.