Religious studies courses can feature a broad range and variety of texts, including anything from The Daodejing, to The Mishnah, to Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, to Mary Douglas’s Purity and Danger, to Said’s Orientalism. The Marty Center partnered with the Undergraduate Religious Studies Program to design “Why This Text Matters” as a series of videos to help faculty prepare for courses, their students, and anyone generally curious about important texts in the study of religion. In the space of about 30 minutes, viewers can gain a deeper understanding of the context, themes, and significance of texts taught by experts at the University of Chicago Divinity School.
About the Text:
Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) is a widely anthologized short story writer who makes everyone’s short list of “American Catholic writers” of the twentieth century. Due in part to her essays but especially to the collection of her (at once amusing and theological) letters under the title The Habit of Being, her reputation can become a puzzle for those who actually read O’Connor’s stories, whose characters are not Catholic and who find themselves (usually unhappily or at least heedlessly) situated in narratives that focus resolutely on the grotesque, and are unsparing in their depictions of violence. In this video Richard A. Rosengarten explores this apparent paradox to consider how one of O’Connor’s greatest and most widely anthologized stories - “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” - captures in the Catholic idea of “sacramentality” an art that not only acknowledges but dares to celebrate the connection between God’s grace, violence, and the grotesque.