O’Connor had a very sharp eye and ear for the sights and sounds of her native land. And for me, a native of western North Carolina living in exile in the Midwest, it is a joy to encounter the “Southernness” in her fictional world, despite the fact that this world she presents is often not at all lovely.

There are a number of reasons why it could be said, albeit from different perspectives, that the Swiss theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar (1905–1988) occupies a unique place among the great thinkers of the twentieth century.

References to the United States are relatively infrequent in Bertrand de Jouvenel’s major works, but America was never far from his thoughts. . . . In On Power, he referred to America as a regime in which Power “has no history” and is limited by local authorities, by a stubbornly independent legislature, by a judiciary “with a penchant for a traditional scheme of individual rights,” and by the fact that the country is inclined to regard those rights as “sacred.”2

It is not, however, with Newman’s educational or polemical writings that I am here concerned but rather with that aspect of his devotional life embodied in the Parochial and Plain Sermons which he preached at Oxford between 1828 and 1841. These, in especial, though extolled by T. S. Eliot and admired by Matthew Arnold, are likely to arouse in us a peculiar discomfort.

For Viereck, “particularized universality” was realized most readily in art, especially literature. He believed that universal values stem not only from experience but also imagined experience. . . . Great literature stirred the moral imagination, facilitating the discovery and reaffirmation of universal values.