Flannery for today

Reprinting a post from last year with a word or two added:

The terror of untethered "tenderness"

One of the tendencies of our age is to use the suffering of children to discredit the goodness of God, and once you have discredited his goodness, you are done with him. . . Ivan Karamazov cannot believe, as long as one child is in torment; Camus' hero cannot accept the divinity of Christ, because of the massacre of the innocents. In this popular pity, we mark our gain in sensibility and our loss of vision. If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is tenderness which, long since cut off from the person of Christ is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber. -- Flannery O'ConnorMystery and Manners

Today, Miss O'Connor would be faced with a horde of trendy pomo emergent-progressive wannabe re-definers of what it means to be an Evangelical, even who the person of Christ is. A gaggle of honking geese who seem to think they know better just because they happen to be among the privileged few walking the earth today.

Funny thing is, I don't think she'd change a word.

The tragedy is, I don't think the trendies would realize she was criticizing them rather than agreeing with them.