Sometimes, perhaps, it feels to us as if there is meaning in human life, as if our suffering can be redeemed, as if God and the Devil are locked in an eternal struggle for our souls. Other times, it feels to us as if there is no meaning, as if nature and fate are indifferent to our suffering and nothing about it can be redeemed, as if God and the Devil are childish images leftover from our ignorant ancestors.

This week we discuss the second half of part two of Flannery O’Connor’s The Violent Bear it Away, which goes straight the heart of such questions by forcing the reader to confront the problem of evil through the suffering and death of innocent children. The perspective of the narrative has switched to Rayber, as he attempts to use his carefully developed worldview of scientific rationality to raise his mute, benighted son Bishop, and to deal with his nephew Tarwater, a boy raised to be an Old Testament prophet by his great-uncle (and Rayber’s uncle), old Tarwater, a boy with a worldview intransigently at odds with Rayber’s own.

Can anything other than mysterious grace redeem suffering? Will that grace ever appear, or has the voice of God gone silent in the modern world? Can love and perfect rationality co-exist in the same heart, or is one always finally forced to choose between them?