Flannery O’Connor’s “both/and” vision of reality

March 25, 2026, marked the centenary year of the birth of one of the greatest fiction writers of the modern era. And as a Catholic, O’Connor had a deep “both/and” instinct, shaped not only by Thomas Aquinas (she wasn’t, as she explained in one letter, a “hillbilly nihilist” but a “hillbilly Thomist”) but also by the various Jesuit thinkers she read: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Henri de Lubac, and William F. Lynch, whom she called “one of the most learned priests in this country.”