So in O’Connor’s beautiful and difficult work, in Gilead, in, I hope, my own fiction, what makes it Christian art is not the desire to glorify God or to avoid challenging anyone’s beliefs. These are works written to be true, honest, beautiful. They do not claim to have the answers, and they do not shrink from offense, if someone chooses to take it. And that’s the sort of beauty that art should aspire to; theology attempts to answer questions, while art is often mysterious and open-ended.
