SOURCE: "Everything Off Balance: Protestant Election in Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man Is Hard to Find'," in The Flannery O'Connor Bulletin, Vol. VII, Autumn, 1979, pp. 116-24.

In the following essay, Bellamy determines the role of Protestantism in "A Good Man Is Hard to Find, " maintaining that "it is difficult to explain the crucial event in this story, the sudden and abrupt conversion of the grandmother, without reference to evangelical Protestantism. "

Robert Milder's article "The Protestantism of Flannery O'Connor," [which was published in The Southern Review, Vol. II, 1975] is based on two essential aspects of Protestantism he finds in O'Connor's so-called Catholic fiction: "The first is an insistence upon the absolute and irremediable corruption of the natural man, and consequently upon the necessity of divine grace for every good work; the second is an exaltation of private religious experience at the expense of the sacraments and the institutional Church...