[Flannery O'Connor] brought a vision as accurate and piercing as any Old Testament prophet; and her work, like the prophets', was aimed at quickening the conscience and calling an estranged people to the tragic glory of God's chosen…. In the fiction of Flannery O'Connor one finds a … preoccupation with the woes and evils of a decaying civilization—a civilization in which the law and fervor and even fanaticism of the backwoods prophets test the metal of the prophets of the secular city, the mouth-wash liberals and Northern do-gooders, and warns them, in the words of Isaiah …: "Woe to you that are wise in your own eyes, and prudent in your own conceits … for they have cast away the law of the Lord of hosts, and have blasphemed the world of the Holy One of Israel" (5:24). A dominant theme in her fiction strongly resembles the lament of the Prophet...