For the defense …

… The soul of Flannery O'Connor - The Spectator World. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The truth is that had Miss O’Connor been a civil rights activist she would not have been the consummate literary artist that she was, the two roles being radically and fundamentally incompatible. The dominant elements in the activist personality are idealism and sentimentalism, or ‘tenderness’ — a quality O’Connor thought led straight to the gas chambers. Flannery O’Connor was neither an idealist nor a sentimentalist but an orthodox Catholic who never allowed even the modern Church to sentimentalize the basic inalterable and irreducible conditions of human life for her. As she wrote to one of her most frequent correspondents and closest friends, ‘We are all The Poor.’