RAFAEL PI ROMAN, correspondent: Even at the end of her short life, when it became harder and harder for her to walk, Flannery O’Connor went to Mass nearly every day at the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Milledgeville, in central Georgia. She lived with her mother in an old plantation house surrounded by 1500 acres of pasture and woods. In her room after church she would write all morning, facing the back of a tall chest so that she would see no distractions. Her output was not massive—two short novels, two collections of short stories, a number of essays, and a lot of letters. But today many consider her one of America’s greatest writers. Since O’Connor’s death, more than 50 books have been written about her, one of them by Ralph Wood of Baylor University.

PROFESSOR RALPH WOOD (Author of Flannery O’Connor and the Christ-Haunted South): Flannery O’Connor is the only great Christian writer this nation has produced.  That is an astonishing fact. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Twain, Emily Dickenson, Frost, Stevens: not one of them Christian, at least not orthodoxly Christian. She is a Southerner and a Catholic, she’s not at the center of American culture, and yet she is our only great Christian writer.

Prof. Ralph Wood

ROMAN: What makes her increasing popularity even more surprising in these secular times is the fact that O’Connor was a self-proclaimed orthodox Catholic whose subject, in her words, was “the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.”

O’Connor was the only child in a respected and well-off family. She was fascinated by birds of all kinds, and when she was a little girl a newsreel cameraman came down to film a chicken Flannery claimed could walk backwards. Later on, her hobby centered on peacocks, a bird she saw as her personal symbol, according to her biographer, Brad Gooch.

BRAD GOOCH (Author of Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor): I think she liked it because it was a comic and gawky bird, like herself. It ate her mother’s flowers and kept everyone awake all night, and then at a certain transfigurative moment tails would open, and here was all this beauty which she saw as a symbol of the way her fiction worked, and also in the Middle Ages the peacock was the symbol of Christ and the church so, you know, it all lined up for her and the peacocks.

ROMAN: As a young woman, O’Connor went to the Iowa Writers Workshop, to the exclusive Yaddo artist’s colony in Saratoga Springs, and then to New York City and Connecticut, writing all the way. Then, at the age of 25, she was forced to return home because, like her father before her, she was dying of lupus. It was back in Georgia in the 1950s that she discovered the characters for her stories.

WOOD: Not the cotton belt, not the tobacco belt, but the ugly word the Bible belt, and for O’Connor that was the glory of her region. These were the emarginated people on the sidelines of southern life in small, out of the way places.

ROMAN: She wrote that her Christ-haunted characters are so cut off from orthodox Catholicism that they don’t have a guide and that they are actually involved in a do-it-yourself religion that is kind of comical, sadly comical.

WOOD: She said, look, these are my brothers and sisters. They are as unlike me as they can be when it comes to the church and its sacraments, but they are a whole of a kind of sweated gospel, a gospel that takes God and God’s world with the utmost seriousness, and therefore I’ve got to attend to them.  I cannot dismiss them, saying these are people after my own heart, and I want to write about them sympathetically.

ROMAN: Father Thomas Joseph White is a Dominican priest whose conversion to Catholicism was influenced by O’Conner’s fiction.

FATHER THOMAS JOSEPH WHITE, OP (Theology Instructor, Dominican House of Studies): You don’t have baptism, confession, and the Mass, which she says are, you know, the center of her life. You have instead odd and grotesque, historically surprising events where people encounter the grace of God.

ROMAN: From these people her stories emerged. In “Wise Blood” and “The Violent Bear It Away,” and in twenty short stories, she told dark tales of murder and bigotry and madness, of a preacher of the Church without Christ who puts out his own eyes. Some have asked, is this Christian?

WOOD: She says most sins are committed by acts of immoderation, of excess, but she says there is one and only one quality that can never be sufficiently immoderate, and that is the love of God, and she saw in these backwoods, southern, I call them folk Christians more than fundamentalists, that kind of completely radical love of God in their own way.

ROMAN: Talk about the importance of grace and mystery in her work.

WOOD: Mystery does not mean for her a kind of a fuzzy, foggy, gooey something or other. It’s a very specific term for her. For her the word mystery means that which is inexhaustible in our knowledge of God, that the deeper we go in understanding who the self-declared, self-revealed God is, the more there is yet to understand, so that the greater our knowledge of God also the greater our ignorance of God, so that we know only a thumbnail of what and who God is.

Brad Gooch

ROMAN: As the civil rights movement changed attitudes and language, O’Connor was sharply criticized for using the N word in her writing.

GOOCH: She couldn’t change that word because that’s the way those people speak.

WOOD: For Flannery O’Connor, race was indeed the curse of the south in the sense that it was the single-most important test which we as white Christians failed. For O’Connor, the mistreatment of black people is a violation of their being creatures made in the image of God.

ROMAN: In recent years, O’Connor has become a favorite not only of writers and scholars but of artists and entertainers of all stripes, including Bruce Springsteen, Bono, the Coen brothers, and even Conan O’Brien and the creators of the hit TV series “Lost.”

Professor Bruce Gentry teaches at O’Conner’s alma mater, Georgia College and State University, and edits the Flannery O’Conner Review.

PROFESSOR BRUCE GENTRY (Editor, Flannery O’Connor Review): She always talks about waking people up to the mystery of the world, and I think that puts her in a position that is similar to a lot of people in popular culture. You know, they want to create something substantial, but they also want to do it for a popular audience.

ROMAN: In the process of writing his biography of Flannery O’Connor, Brad Gooch says he came to admire her discipline and determination, particularly during the final months of her life.

GOOCH: She was staying alive through writing, and you see it at the end of her life, where it becomes a real race with death. She’s working on stories which she keeps under her pillow in the hospital so the doctor won’t take them away from her. She’s editing one story after she’s had last rites. So all of this seems to me a very clear kind of sense that this is what’s keeping her alive, or why she’s alive.

ROMAN: O’Connor’s admirers wonder what her legacy will be in years to come. Some say that will depend on whether future readers will understand a writer who saw “the action of grace in territory held by the devil.”

I’m Rafael Pi Roman for Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

(from movie trailer, various voices): I’ve tried to be a serious man. We’re going to be fine. I’ve tried to do right, be a member of the community. Please just tell him I need help.

KIM LAWTON, correspondent: “A Serious Man” is a dark comedy that asks some universally serious questions.

CATHLEEN FALSANI (Author, The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers): Why do we suffer? If God is there and God is a good God, why do bad things happen to decent people? I don’t care what flavor of spiritual person you are, or if you are a person of faith or not, there is no real good satisfactory answer to that.

LAWTON: Religion columnist Cathleen Falsani is author of The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers. She says the brothers’ newest film grapples with those theological questions in unexpected—and yes, quirky—ways.

FALSANI: It’s a powerful film, but it’s a powerfully funny film as well, and in the Coens’ 25 years of filmmaking, it’s often their funniest films that are in some ways the darkest, the most serious spiritually.

Ethan and Joel Coen

(from movie): Honey, I think it’s time we started talking about a divorce.

LAWTON: Set in 1967, the story centers around a Jewish physics professor, Larry Gopnick, who experiences a Job-like set of personal and professional calamities. He looks to his faith to make sense of it all.

(Larry Gopnick, from movie): Please, I need help. I’ve already talked to the other rabbis. I’ve had quite a bit of tzurus lately. Marital problems, professional, you name it. This is not a frivolous request.

LAWTON: He doesn’t find any easy answers.

(dialogue from movie): Rabbi’s secretary: The rabbi is busy. Larry Gopnick: He didn’t look busy. Secretary: He’s thinking.

FALSANI: To their credit, the rabbis in the film don’t really try to give an answer. I think they kind of encourage the wrestling out of the answer, which is, in fact, in my estimation, to continue to live your life.

LAWTON: The film is full of Jewish motifs. It’s set in a community outside Minneapolis, where the Coen brothers themselves grew up in the 1960s. They say with “A Serious Man” they wanted to explore what they call “the whole Jewish Midwestern thing.”

ETHAN COEN (filmmaker): The whole incongruity of Jews in the Midwest, Jews on the plains. It’s just—it’s odd, and that incongruity is something that we kind of wanted to get across, too. It’s its own strange subculture.

LAWTON: They acknowledge nervousness among some Jews about how the film may come across.

ETHAN COEN: People were really supportive in the Jewish community especially, but you know, occasionally people would ask, you’re not making fun of the Jews, are you? This really deep Jewish thing where, you know, is this good for the Jews or bad for the Jews?

LAWTON: Like Larry’s son, Danny, the Coen brothers went to Hebrew school and were bar mitzvahed. They’ve indicated that faith no longer plays a central role in their lives, but they are notoriously reticent to discuss their personal beliefs or the messages in their 14 films.

FALSANI: They don’t say a lot about what they believe or don’t, but their movies are filled with theological and metaphysical and existential questions.

LAWTON: Falsani admits those themes may not always be obvious in what she calls “the Coeniverse”—the enigmatic and sometimes violent worlds the Coens have created.

FALSANI: I think there is a moral order to the Coeniverse, if you will. It might not be the moral order we were hoping for, but it’s there.

LAWTON: “A Serious Man” may be more overt than other Coen films in its religious exploration, but it is no more obvious in its conclusions. Still, Falsani says, in true Coenesque fashion, meaning can come by simply raising the questions.

(Larry Gopnick, from movie): I need help.

I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: When the sun comes up in Second Life, which it does every four hours, you are immediately overwhelmed by the vast, brightly colored mish-mash of stores, houses, and malls stretching across multiple continents—all of it, including the mountains and forests, designed and built from scratch by the tens of thousands of people who regularly visit here.

Move your mouse and you tour the Taj Mahal. A few clicks and you are launched on a NASA rocket into low orbit. Click again and you can join a service in an Anglican cathedral. This live, online world called Second Life was launched in 2003 by the San Francisco company Linden Lab and its founder Phillip Rosedale, who says he had no idea what would happen.

PHILIP ROSEDALE (Chairman of the Board, Linden Lab): Well, I always figured in the beginning that if Second Life looked like anything we were able to predict that we would have failed, that if it was predictable we weren’t doing the right stuff.

SEVERSON: Second Life is definitely not predictable. Turn a corner and you might run into a furry animal that talks. It isn’t just the buildings that are designed by residents. They also design themselves, creating virtual bodies called avatars either sculpted in their own likeness or, more often, someone they would like to be. And then they chat with other avatars, even becoming close friends. For some, the virtual world is a way to escape. Others say it enriches their real-world lives.

(to Michael Adcock): You still seem to get this social value out of it.

MICHAEL ADCOCK (Freelance Designer): Yeah, I do.

SEVERSON: Michael Adcock has been into Second Life for about three years. He says, for him, hiding his real identity behind an avatar which, in his case, looks like a warrior painted in silver, has helped him learn more about himself.

MICHAEL ADCOCK: I’ve found that I’ve been able to be a lot more up-front and blunt in what is on my mind right away. That happens to say quite a bit about myself, and I choose to look at that as a learning experience.

SEVERSON: Most people in Second Life don’t use real names. The woman you see here might actually be a man, or vice versa.

This avatar actually is a man. He’s Tom Boellstorff, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine and editor-in-chief of the American Anthropologist.  He has written extensively on the culture of virtual worlds.

PROFESSOR TOM BOELLSTORFF (University of California, Irvine): For some people, the escape factor is one of the best things about a virtual world like Second Life. You can try having a totally different life, and there’s people who get married inside of Second Life to someone that they don’t even know who that person is in the physical world, even if it’s really a man or a woman in the physical world. They have a house and even virtual kids and a job, and they have a whole life inside of Second Life.

SEVERSON: It costs nothing to get into Second Life, but if you choose to be part of it, to build a home, for instance, then you will have to spend real money. It’s like visiting a foreign land. You convert dollars into Second Life currency called Linden dollars.

Professor Tom Boellstorff

PROFESSOR BOELLSTORFF: So here is what my house looks like. This is land that I own. I spent—this cost about $50 US to buy this land and about $15 a month to keep, to be able to continue to own it. That’s how the company makes their money.

SEVERSON: You constructed a cathedral like this once?

MICHAEL ADCOCK: Yeah, I did.

SEVERSON: How long did it take you?

MICHAEL ADCOCK: Eighteen months.

SEVERSON: Eighteen months of your life.

MICHAEL ADCOCK: Yeah, off and on, you know.

SEVERSON: Where is it?

MICHAEL ADCOCK: It’s deleted now.

SEVERSON: Wait a minute. Eighteen months, and it’s deleted?

MICHAEL ADCOCK: I couldn’t afford to maintain the simulation, to keep it running, yeah.

SEVERSON: It would have cost him $350 a month to keep it. But there are other cathedrals he can visit which took other residents months or even years to build.

MICHAEL ADCOCK: There is a cathedral right here.

SEVERSON: You don’t look like a typical Sunday churchgoer.

MICHAEL ADCOCK: That’s true, I don’t. But they’re nice, and they welcomed me and asked me how I’m doing.

SEVERSON: It took a decade for churches to have a strong presence on the Internet, but Professor Boellstorff says it is beginning to attract followers in Second Life.

PROFESSOR BOELLSTORFF: There are already people I know who say that they go to, you know, every Sunday they don’t go to church any more in the physical world. They go every Sunday to church in Second Life, and that is their faith community that they are interacting with.

SEVERSON: We spoke with the leadership team of the Anglican Cathedral of Second Life. Mark Brown is the priest-in-charge. In real life he runs a Bible society in Wellington, New Zealand. Cady Enoch chairs the committee. She’s in Columbus, Ohio, and Helene Milena is the worship service leader. She’s in West Yorkshire, England.

HELENE MILENA (Teacher and Counselor): I think there is an intimacy here, in any online set-up, actually, but at the same time there is an anonymity, and the two mean that people can be very, very open. It would be very unusual in real life to meet someone and ten minutes later be knowing about their difficulties with their marriage, or something of that nature.

SEVERSON: In order to accommodate attendees from around the world, the virtual church is now offering 7 services a week.

MARK BROWN (CEO, New Zealand Bible Society): Straightaway it is the opportunity to mingle with people around the world. We have about 20 nations represented in our community. I absolutely love that. I love the richness of that, that regardless of where we are in the world, we can come together and worship.

SEVERSON: Second Lifers tend to become hooked on the experience. Michael Adcock says he was spending 12 or more hours a day for awhile. This can have negative consequences on real-world relationships. There have been at least two highly publicized divorces resulting from what were supposedly virtual affairs in Second Life. Questions are often raised about ethical behavior by people who can hide behind anonymous identities on the Internet.

SIBLEY VERBECK (Founder and CEO, The Electric Sheep Company): If you look out on the Web, as long as there’s been forums where people post comments or chat rooms, people are often quite rude to each other, and a lot of that is that degree of anonymity that’s there.

SEVERSON: Sibley Verbeck founded the Electric Sheep Company, which has created its own virtual worlds. He thinks people tend to be more civil in Second Life

SIBLEY VERBECK: But it is more human, because you see this human figure, and you’re interacting with them in real time.

MICHAEL ADCOCK: I don’t see much of a difference between what I’m doing here, or what I’m thinking, or what I’m doing in my real life. It’s all the same thing.

SEVERSON: There’s not much you can’t find or do in Second Life. There are virtual shops that sell everything from virtual artwork to virtual waterfalls. Second Life is a community of creators, and it’s economy is based to a large extent on marketing art and architecture.

PHILIP ROSEDALE: So far as we can tell, there’s like 60,000 people that are cash-flow positive from their operations, but there’s thousands of people that would call this employment of some kind.

SEVERSON: Elisha Allen is director of new media and extended learning at the University of New Mexico. Like many learning institutions, the university is experimenting with Second Life as way to reach students who can’t make it to the campus.

ELISHA ALLEN (Associate Director, New Media and Extended Learning, University of New Mexico): I’ve been to a number of conferences in Second Life where I had the opportunity to meet peers at other universities without actually having to fly there, and it’s interesting because the memories of those conferences are very real, and it did feel like I was there, wherever “there” was.

SEVERSON: But Elisha agrees with those who say that navigating around Second Life can be daunting.

ELISHA ALLEN: Second Life, while it’s maybe the state-of-the-art for virtual worlds right now, I think has a long way to go before it’s something that I would consider to be really, fully immersive.

SEVERSON: For others, like Reverend Mark, it’s a godsend.

MARK BROWN: There’s no artificiality of me, here I am sitting in my study in New Zealand looking at a monitor. I am real flesh-and-blood. The way I am communicating and relating, of course, is different, but the same experience is welling up, and that is really how this is able to be intense and intimate and actually quite a real experience.

SEVERSON: About a million-and-a-half people have visited Second Life in the last couple of months. They are typically in their mid-thirties. But there are millions of kids under 12 who are growing up with virtual reality games and programs designed especially for them. Verbeck and others predict that a decade from now, when these kids are in their 20s, places like Second Life are going to grow dramatically in popularity.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in San Francisco.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: We have a Road to Damascus story today about a hard-living, cynical Hollywood writer who says he hit bottom one day and was transformed by God. He used to specialize in scripts full of sex, violence, and evil. Now he’s a family man in Ohio. Our story is from Bob Faw.

BOB FAW: Once dubbed by Time magazine “America’s king of sex and violence,” Joe Eszterhas now bears the cross. This is more than ritual.

JOE ESZTERHAS: It’s a very, very serious and sacred moment to me.

FAW: You write, “I carry the cross as though I were actually carrying Christ.”

Mr. ESZTERHAS: Yes.

FAW: Worshipping at Holy Angels Catholic Church in Chagrin Falls, Ohio, where he now lives, Eszterhas resembles only physically who he once was:  Hollywood’s highest-paid screenwriter, churning out erotic sizzlers like “Basic Instinct,” where depravity — indeed, evil — triumphed.

“I don’t know why God has blessed me and graced me the way God has.”

Actor WAYNE NIGHT (as Police Interrogator John Corelli in clip from “Basic Instinct”): Would you tell us the nature of your relationship with Mr. Boz?

Actress SHARON STONE (as Catherine Tramell in clip from “Basic Instinct”): I had sex with him for about a year and a half.

Mr. ESZTERHAS: I was drawn to dark subjects and dark themes, and I wrote out of a very dark space at that particular point in my life.

FAW: The 16 films he wrote grossed over $1 billion, financed homes in Malibu and Maui, along with an outrageous lifestyle.

(reading from notes): “I’ve been a bad boy all my life. I was the king-daddy of sex and violence, the wild hair, the rogue elephant, the drinking, drugging, wild man, the cocaine cowboy.”

Mr. ESZTERHAS: That’s all true. Yeah, I did do all that. The booze was out of control. The waking up in the morning and not knowing where I was or who I was with was out of control.

FAW: The alcohol and the cigarettes almost killed him. In 2001, doctors removed 80 percent of his cancerous larynx and inserted a trachea for breathing. Unable to change his ways, high-flying Joe Ezsterhas crashed.

Mr. ESZTERHAS: It was probably the most desolate moment of my life, and a block away from here I sat down on a curb, sweating, shaking, trying to get the bugs out of my trachea, trying to breathe properly, and I started to cry.

FAW: Slumped on that curb, Eszterhas says he felt a dazzling presence, and he heard a voice within.

Mr. ESZTERHAS: And I kept hearing this voice saying, “Please God, help me,” and I realized it was my voice inside my head and that I was praying.

FAW: He was, he writes in his memoir “Crossbearer,” God-struck, and the ultimate Hollywood animal who had scorned religion did not find God. God, he says, found him.

Father Dan Schlegel

Mr. ESZTERHAS: When you’re absolutely cracked open, and you’re completely vulnerable and desolate, when I opened myself up to the possibility of God entering my heart, I think God did. That day I was ambushed by God.

FAW: That recognition of weakness, says Rabbi David Wolpe, who has studied and written about how the desperate find faith—that recognition is the beginning of strength, even salvation.

Rabbi DAVID WOLPE (Sinai Temple, Los Angeles, CA): I do think that great joy and great sadness or illness sort of crack open something inside you, and it makes you open to things that you before that thought were absurd or ridiculous.

Father DAN SCHLEGEL (Church of the Holy Angels, Chagrin Falls, OH): Somebody wrote God comes through the wound, and, you know, sometimes it’s not until we’re really broken people that God has an entryway into our lives.

FAW: Father Dan Schlegel is Joe’s priest at Holy Angels.

Fr. SCHLEGEL: For Joe, I think that there were other gods before him, whether it was alcohol, or whether it was power or money or prestige, or whatever it was, and when all those things didn’t work anymore and he was broken, in  a sense there’s an openness for God to come in.

FAW: Joe Eszterhas had lived through radical change before. Born in Hungary during the Second World War, he spent nearly five years in refugee camps. But the change, which began on that sidewalk in 2001, his wife Naomi recalls, took some adjustment.

NAOMI ESZTERHAS: His transformation, to use that phrase, was so gradual. It was very gradual. Joe is a cynic. He’s had a very — he had a hard life, you know. He ate pine-needle soup in the refugee camps. He was scalded in the refugee camps. He had rickets. He lived in abject poverty. So when he first took those baby steps toward God, it wasn’t without cynicism. I think he went, “OK, I’m going to go down this road.”

Father Bob Stec

FAW: For Eszterhas that road meant, with his entire family, starting to attend church weekly, also reading and studying widely about God and theology. Still, he found himself unsure, tentative, even wary until one Sunday when his former priest, Father Bob Stec, approached him after a service.

Father BOB STEC (Pastor, St. Ambrose Catholic Church, Brunswick, OH): I was literally just drawn to stop and simply share with him a simple phrase: “Joe, the best is yet to come”— with a message of hope, a message of assurance that it was going to be OK. It was just as if God said, “Joe needs to hear these words today.”

Mr. ESZTERHAS (praying): …to Christ our Lord. Amen.

FAW: Now, devoted to his wife and four young sons and pronounced cured of cancer by his doctors, Joe Eszterhas says life has never been better.

Ms. ESZTERHAS: I think he’s more careful. He’s more Christian. He’s more—less cynical and more willing to believe the goodness in people than he is the darkness. I always tell him, “You’ve been co-opted by God, and now you’re working for him, because you used to dance with the devil.”

FAW: The question you would ask yourself is, then, why do I deserve to be singled out like this?

Mr. ESZTERHAS: I don’t. I don’t. I don’t know why God has blessed me and graced me the way God has. In terms of my own view of my life, you know, it’s something miraculous. I thank God for gracing me. I always will. But in my own mind I don’t deserve it.

FAW: And it is that sense of mystery, even wonder, which he conveys at public readings of the book he subtitles “A Memoir of Faith.”

Mr. ESZTERHAS: This is how I found God, or how God found me.

FAW: Recently Eszterhas has completed two screenplays, each one a thriller, but neither focusing on the perverse or the tormented.

Rabbi David Wolpe

FAW: You can’t write “blood and hair on the walls” with God in your heart?

Mr. ESZTERHAS: Yeah, you know, to get involved in that thought process, I don’t want to do that. I don’t want to do that.

FAW: Walking with his wife, or alone, three times every day Joe Eszterhas prays — mostly what he calls “thank you” prayers.

Mr. ESZTERHAS: I pray for God’s presence to be in my heart, to continue to be in my heart

Rabbi WOLPE: What I tell people to pray for who are in trouble is closeness, is to not be alone; is to feel that God is with you. That prayer — that’s a powerful prayer. That’s a real prayer, and that’s a prayer I believe that gets answered.

FAW: And seven years after being what he calls God-struck, Joe Eszterhas, a lifelong skeptic, has no doubts that his prayers have been heard.

Mr. ESZTERHAS: I think questioning and doubt are good, and I think they build faith, in my own particular case. Seven years down the line I can say to you that my life has been transformed, and I find a sense of solace and strength that simply wasn’t in my life before.

FAW: Joe Eszterhas then, born anew — from Malibu to Ohio; Jack Daniels to Sprite; Sharon Stone to Jesus. From darkness into light.

For RELIGION & ETHICS NEWSWEEKLY, this is Bob Faw in Chagrin Falls, Ohio.