The fiction of the late Flannery O'Connor … poses a unique problem. Unlike some contemporary Christian writers, she makes no concessions to the non-Christian world: on the whole, she refuses to make her ideology palatable to non-Christian readers by suggesting any philosophical frame of reference other than that of Christian orthodoxy. And today this is an extremely big risk to take: such a theme and such methods inevitably deny the Christian writer many readers. Significantly, many of those same readers find Dante and [John] Milton as rewarding as ever. But one suspects that they may be reading Paradise Lost and the Divine Comedy simply as "poetry" and discounting what they believe to be the theological residuum as "history"—interesting but no longer relevant in these enlightened times.

This approach, however, is almost impossible with Miss O'Connor. For one thing, she is only recently dead: in a sense, she has...