I am aware of the danger of putting O’Connor in the company of evangelical Protestants, but there is justification for doing so. On O’Connor’s Protestantism, see Robert Milder, “The Protestantism of Flannery O’Connor.” While O’Connor clearly identified as, and wrote about being, a Catholic writer, Milder convincingly argues that, “in repudiating what she regarded as the predominantly ethical mainstream of American Christianity, Flannery O’Connor was returning not to the Catholic tradition but to the evangelical Protestantism of the Reformation and the seventeenth century, a Protestantism whose lineal, if shrunken, descendants were the backwoods prophets of the modern South” (803-04). See also, Michael O. Bellamy, “Everything Off Balance: Protestant Election in Flannery O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find,’” as well as Ralph C. Wood’s “Flannery O’Connor’s Strange Alliance with Southern Fundamentalists.”
On the idea of a “final vocabulary,” see “The Contingency of Language” in Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1999).
Whether or not it measures the degree to which readers accept the Christian narrative about the reality and inevitability of the coming apocalypse, it is worth noting here that the 12-volume Left Behind series about the Rapture has sold more than 60 million copies (Hedges 44).
The full transcript of Pat Robertson’s interview with Jerry Falwell on The 700 Club
can be found at http://www.commondreams.org/news2001/0917-03.htm. All quotations
from this interview can be found there.
An excerpt from “Dominus Iesus” can be found at http://natcath.org/NCR_Online/
archives2/2000c/091500/091500d.htm. All quotations can be found there.
It is important to acknowledge that not all self-identified evangelicals agree with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson. As Hedges writes: “American fundamentalists and evangelicals, however, are sharply divided between strict fundamentalists—those who refuse to grant legitimacy to alternative views of the Christian tradition—and the many evangelicals who conceded that there are other legitimate ways to worship and serve Christ [….] While a majority of Christian Americans embrace a literal interpretation of the bible, only a tine minority—among them the Christian dominionists—are comfortable with this darker vision of an intolerant, theocratic America. Unfortunately, it is this minority that is taking over the machinery of U.S. state and religious institutions” (18-9).
See Part One, section two of Paine’s The Age of Reason (1794).
For important discussions of “unconditional hospitality,” see the final chapter of Jacques Derrida’s Acts of Religion (2002), Derrida’s Of Hospitality (2002), as well as Giovanna Borradori’s interview with Derrida in Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (2003). On “open commensality,” see Chapter Three of John Dominic Crossan’s Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994).
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