Monsieur Maritain, Meet Miss O’Connor

About the Book “Christian dogma is about the only thing left in the world that surely guards and respects mystery. The fiction writer is an observer, first, last, and always, but he cannot be an adequate observer unless he is free from uncertainty about what he sees. Those who have no absolute values cannot let the relative remain merely relative; they are always raising it to the level of the absolute.” What does it mean to be an artist? To be an artist and a believer, in the midst of a world so steeped in utility, secularity, “science,” and technology that it seems to have no time or place for either? What are the contrasts and parallels among art, prudence, morality, wisdom, and contemplation? These profound questions are asked by too few and answered by still fewer. If we could overhear a conversation about them, would we not find Jacques Maritain and Flannery O’Connor a surprisingly well-matched pair—the influential matchmaker of the wedding of “art and scholasticis