Ex-Centric People

"She was unabashedly eccentric in the admirable and literal sense of the word-not in an easy disdain for the masses, but in candid recognition that Christians are necessarily ex-centric, pivoting about another Center than the world's hub or their own ego.
O'Connor's recognition that she was called to be a writer was linked with her simultaneous discovery that there is nothing larger than the Gospel and the Church, since they reenact the drama of the entire cosmos. In order to be catholic (universal), she had first to be Catholic, ordering everything-however imperfectly-to the goodness of the triune God."

• Ralph C. Wood on author, Flannery O'Connor (National Review, March 9, 2009)