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Through her fiction, Flannery O'Connor reenvisioned life as a supernatural war wherein each soul becomes the site of a clash of mysterious, almost incomprehensible forces. Her first novel, Wise Blood, tells the story of Hazel Motes, a young preacher with a new religion to sell: the Church Without Christ. In this episode, JF and Phil read Motes's misadventures in the "Jesus-haunted" city of Taulkinham, Tennessee, as a prophetic vision of the modern condition that is at once supremely tragic and funny as hell. As O'Connor herself wrote in her prefac to the book: "(Wise Blood) is a comic novel about a Christian malgr\xe9 lui, and as such, very serious, for all comic novels that are any good must be about matters of life and death.

REFERENCES

Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
\nJames Marshall, George and Martha (here's a great NYT piece on the books)
\nGraham Hancock, Fingerprints of the Gods
\nPaul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage
\nJonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind
\nG. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
\nDaniel Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha
\nGeorge Santayana, The Sense of Beauty
\nAmy Hungerford's lecture on Wise Blood (Yale University)