Jerome C. Foss is associate professor of politics at Saint Vincent College.

One temptation in analyzing O’Connor is to use her work to demonstrate the Catholic worldview that mysteriously informs her fiction, a tendency both encouraged and thwarted by her own wry, acute commentaries on fiction and faith. In Flannery O’Connor and the Perils of Governing by Tenderness, Foss makes this risk an opportunity to summarize Augustinian and Thomistic theology, especially the latter’s synthesis of Christian revelation with classical notions of reason and political life.

• 1. Mystery, Manners, and Regimes2. The Ancient View of Politics3. The Intelligent Holiness of the Medieval Mind 4. The First Modern Man: The Master of Things5. The Second Modern Man: Caught in a Maze of Guilt6. The Third Modern Man: Feeling About for the Lost God7. Returning to the Source of Tenderness 8. Concluding Reflection: Motes and Rawls in America

Jerome C. Foss is associate professor of politics at Saint Vincent College.

One temptation in analyzing O’Connor is to use her work to demonstrate the Catholic worldview that mysteriously informs her fiction, a tendency both encouraged and thwarted by her own wry, acute commentaries on fiction and faith. In Flannery O’Connor and the Perils of Governing by Tenderness, Foss makes this risk an opportunity to summarize Augustinian and Thomistic theology, especially the latter’s synthesis of Christian revelation with classical notions of reason and political life.

• 1. Mystery, Manners, and Regimes2. The Ancient View of Politics3. The Intelligent Holiness of the Medieval Mind 4. The First Modern Man: The Master of Things5. The Second Modern Man: Caught in a Maze of Guilt6. The Third Modern Man: Feeling About for the Lost God7. Returning to the Source of Tenderness 8. Concluding Reflection: Motes and Rawls in America