Flannery O'Connor's Integral Ecology

In her writing, Flannery O'Connor incorporates the Eucharistic mysticism of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and thereby anticipates the integral ecology of Pope Francis's encyclical Laudato Si. For O'Connor and for Pope Francis, as for Teilhard de Chardin, humans are called not to exploitation but to the cultivation of habits of attention, an ethic of care for the natural world, and participation in universal communion. In works such as "Revelation" and "A View of the Woods," O'Connor provides a stark contrast: monstrous exploitation of nature or an openness to the divinization of the cosmos.