SOURCE: Desmond, John F. “Flannery O'Connor and the Idolatrous Mind.” Christianity and Literature 46, 1 (autumn 1996): 25-35.

In the following essay, Desmond investigates O'Connor's view of the modern idolatrous mind through an analysis of her story “An Artificial Nigger.”

It was Flannery O'Connor's fellow Southern-Catholic writer Walker Percy who defined central features of the modern idolatrous mind in his essay “Notes for a Novel about the End of the World.” Speaking of our present-day diminished religious capacities, Percy said:

The question is not whether the Good News is no longer relevant, but rather whether it is possible that man is presently undergoing a tempestuous restructuring of his consciousness which does not presently allow him to take account of the Good News. For what has happened is not merely the technological transformation of the world but something psychologically even more portentous. It is the absorption by the layman not of the...