Challenge Accepted!

As much as I love a moral dilemma, I also love a challenge, especially one in which I gain new perspectives and grow in understanding. I refer my post last week titled “A Moral Dilemma,” which engendered more commentary and response than I expected!

One especially challenged me to examine how surface our thinking can be, how quick and superficially we come to conclusions without appropriate – and enriching – discernment. We just take a look, see how an event, argument, analysis fits into our preconceptions, and off we go – as in writing them off – and moving on without taking the time for thoughtful consideration. I’m sure I’m often as guilty of this kind of facile analysis when trying to make the case for women’s ordination, ministry, and leadership as those who make theirs against it. Here then is an example of ‑ and I would argue, a guide to – how we might proceed instead.

Jim Rodgers, former English literature professor and Dean of Arts & Sciences at a university in Michigan, took issue with my conclusion in the debate surrounding the removal of renowned American Catholic author Flannery O’Connor’s name from a dormitory building at Loyola Maryland University mainly because of recently published racist remarks she had made in a letter to a friend. After some (but perhaps not enough) thinking, I came down in favor of the decision to remove her name. Jim Rodgers challenged that conclusion:

Well, I'm about to do what I'll spend a little time condemning--that is, give you a half-thought-out response based on a clouded memory of reading both Flannery O'Connor's work and the New Yorker article at the heart of the matter.  I've also read the two Commonweal articles, so thanks for those!

So I guess you've figured out that I've reached a conclusion the opposite of yours, based on my life-long relationship to O'Connor's work, to her fierce humor, and the shock of her honesty. I would object to the way the decision was made--a typically cowardly university administrator's way of making the decision and implementing it in the summer when students and faculty are away: Just a little three-person committee of president, lit professor, and theology professor--not exactly representative. 

One wonders if they had read anything more than the Elie (New Yorker) article. Did they read O'Connor's work--or more pertinently works? What would have been really productive and truly challenging would be for the president to sit down with the students assigned to the dormitory and for the group--now get this crazy idea!-- to have had discussions based on all of them actually having read widely and deeply in her work. The president, the faculty, and the students might all have learned something about her, might have grown to love (or detest, not likely) her work, and, most important, might have learned something about human relations and themselves. Surely, that would be good for administrators, professors, and students, who all have a strong tendency to think they know what the truth is before they actually encounter it.  

After all that, they might decide her name just has to go. So be it. At least, the decision would have been made on the basis of hard study (euphemism for reading entire books and many stories, letters, and essays) and argumentation from various viewpoints. I think that would be more worthy of a university than making decisions based solely on the bigwigs' perhaps mistaken impression of the students' feelings about their "home," which a dormitory is not. It seems a university's mission is not to prejudge its students' feelings (which judgment may be accurate but may not) but to challenge their preconceptions through reasoning and new knowledge. It's what we liberal professors have been doing to our students, especially our conservative students, probably since universities were founded in the thirteenth century. Were we wrong all along? Should we have been bubble-wrapping their feelings?

So, yes, I'm opposed to erasing writers and artists from our consideration, from being honored, from their inclusion in the parts of our culture we preserve, based on their all-too-human trait of having evil feelings and then having the all-too-uncommon audacity (because they are artists) to record and express their feelings and then having the even-more-rare compulsion to combat those feelings in powerful works of art that emanate from their better natures. 

I hope the administration at Loyola of Maryland has the generosity of spirit to at least rename a maintenance shed in Flannery O'Connor's honor so they don't have to waste the letters they took down from the dorm. I know she would see the humor in that.

Okay, full disclosure: Jim Rodgers is my brother and often challenges – as well as delights – me. One of the other commentators mentioned not reading much Flannery O’Connor because she found the violence in the stories unbearable. I admittedly had felt the same. Jim reminded me that central to her stories is the exposure of the “willed ignorance of people to the violence of society” and certainly part of that “willed ignorance” is of white complicity in racism and in all the suffering we cause by leading unexamined, complacent, and privileged lives.

And so, I accepted Jim’s challenge and reread “Everything That Rises Must Converge” and “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” and “Revelation.”  Now I’m passing the challenge on. Please read and discuss.