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Flannery O'Connor and religious epistemology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 September 2018

JASON BAEHR
JASON BAEHR*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Loyola Marymount University, One LMU Drive, Los Angeles, CA, 90045, USA
*
e-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

What are the demands of religious inquiry? It can be tempting to think of these demands in strictly epistemic terms, e.g. as a function of the inquirer's background beliefs, cognitive faculties, natural cognitive ability, intellectual skills, and intellectual character. In this article, I extrapolate an alternative model of religious inquiry from three stories by the Southern Gothic writer Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964). According to the model, a person's fitness for religious inquiry also depends on whether she possesses a certain moral posture. In particular, I argue that something like moral humility functions as an epistemic virtue in the theistic domain.

Type
Original Article
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 56 , Issue 3 , September 2020 , pp. 349 - 369
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018

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