Through her fiction, Flannery O'Connor reenvisioned life as a supernatural war wherein each soul becomes the site of a clash of mysterious, almost incomprehensible forces. Her first novel, Wise Blood, tells the story of Hazel Motes, a young preacher with a new religion to sell: the Church Without Christ. In this episode, JF and Phil read Motes's misadventures in the "Jesus-haunted" city of Taulkinham, Tennessee, as a prophetic vision of the modern condition that is at once supremely tragic and funny as hell. As O'Connor herself wrote in her prefac to the book: "(Wise Blood) is a comic novel about a Christian malgré lui, and as such, very serious, for all comic novels that are any good must be about matters of life and death.REFERENCESFlannery O'Connor, [Wise Blood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WiseBlood)_James Marshall, [George and Martha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeorgeandMartha) (here's a great NYT piece (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/29/books/george-and-martha-james-marshall.html) on the books)Graham Hancock, [Fingerprints of the Gods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FingerprintsoftheGods)_Paul Elie, The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (https://www.amazon.com/Life-You-Save-May-Your/dp/0374529213)Jonathan Haidt, [The Righteous Mind](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheRighteousMind)G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/130)Daniel Ingram, Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha (https://www.mctb.org)George Santayana, [The Sense of Beauty](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheSenseofBeauty)_Amy Hungerford's lecture (https://oyc.yale.edu/english/engl-291/lecture-3) on Wise Blood (Yale University)