SOURCE: Shaw, Mary Neff. “Responses to God's Grace: Varying Degrees of Doubt in Flannery O'Connor's Character Types.” CLA Journal 44, no. 4 (June 2001): 471-79.

In the following essay, Shaw utilizes Michael Polanyi's theological work in order to provide a religious interpretation of O'Connor's short fiction.

Even though Flannery O'Connor is a Roman Catholic who affirms certain spiritual verities—faith, grace, sin, the devil, and death—“[t]hese pre-occupations are … not bound up with Catholic doctrine, but rather reflect deeply spiritual entities,” according to Sister Kathleen Feely.¹ Sister Mariella Gable concurs with Feely as she refers to O'Connor's Christian base: “She wrote for an unbelieving world, not for Catholics.”² In fact, O'Connor herself stated at the Vanderbilt Library Symposium in 1959 that belief, and not theology, would permeate her writings: “You can forget about the system. These are things that you believe; they may affect your writing unconsciously. I don't think theology...