In the spring of 2016, students at Wesleyan’s Institute for Lifelong Learning and I began an exploratory discussion focused on four striking stories by one of America’s most celebrated authors, Flannery O’Connor.  I would like to continue that richly rewarding enterprise by considering four more O’Connor efforts that likewise expertly map the contours of a deracinated landscape wrapped in vast swaths of darkness, visible yet simultaneously leavened by a restorative lightness of being that salves the scarred acres of sullied souls.  Specifically, we’ll study “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” “The Enduring Chill,” “Revelation,” and “Parker’s Back.”  Everyone is welcome to the proceedings, returning and newcomers alike.  No prior knowledge of O’Connor is necessary.  All that is required is a willingness to ponder the perennial mystery of how a master story-teller takes the raw elements of felt experience—say, anguish, sickness, blight―and transforms them aesthetically into their polar opposites in the span of a few inspired and inspiring pages.