Unveiled

The "collection of 274 letters" between Flannery O'Connor and Elizabeth Hester "will be opened to the public May 12" at Emory University:

"Hester, a file clerk in an Atlanta credit bureau, lived a reclusive life, but she was an avid reader and intellectual. She also corresponded with British writer Iris Murdoch. Her identity as one of O’Connor’s confidants was kept secret until Hester’s death in 1998."

(via Maud)

Emory is now added to the Thomas Merton Center at Bellarmine University as a place I must visit someday soon. In the meantime, I've been rereading bits from The Habit of Being:

Leaving the Incarnation aside, the very notion of God's existence is not emotionally satisfactory anymore for great numbers of people, which does not mean God ceases to exist. M. Sartre finds God emotionally unsatisfactory in the extreme, as do most of my friends of lesser stature than he. The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally. A higher paradox confounds the emotion as well as reason and there are long periods in the lives of all of us, when the truth as revealed by faith is hideous, emotionally disturbing, downright repulsive. Witness the dark night of the soul in individual saints. Right now the whole world appears to be going through a dark night of the soul.

(via If Flannery Had A Blog...)

UPDATE: Maud takes a closer look at the contents.