In this episode of Hot Takes on the Classics, Tim McIntosh and Emily Maeda explore Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge,” a story of young adulthood, race, pride, dependence, and painful moral awakening. Set largely on a city bus, the story brings Julian, a self-consciously progressive college graduate, into collision with his cheerful but deeply prejudiced mother as the changing South forces people who would rather remain separate into uncomfortable proximity. Along the way, Tim and Emily consider O’Connor’s grotesque humor, her idea of dark grace, the story’s title from Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and the devastating moment when Julian’s superiority gives way to guilt and sorrow.

Episode Outline

• Young adulthood and the idea that adulthood begins when other people can depend on you
• The bus as a confined social space where strangers, classes, and racial tensions are forced together
• Flannery O’Connor’s Georgia upbringing, Iowa Writers’ Workshop years, illness, and return to Andalusia
• O’Connor’s mastery of the short story, grotesque imagery, and moments of “dark grace”
• Recurring O’Connor figures: dependent mothers, educated young adults, racial conflict, and moral self-deception
• Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and the phrase “everything that rises must converge”
• Julian as an educated, progressive, frustrated young writer who still depends on his mother
• Julian’s mother as cheerful, sacrificial, socially proud, and deeply shaped by racist assumptions
• The extravagant hat as a symbol of distinction that unexpectedly reveals common humanity
• Julian’s performative solidarity on the integrated bus and his mother’s condescending friendliness
• The matching hats, the penny, the blow from the purse, and the story’s violent moment of convergence
• Julian’s final dark grace: the collapse of superiority and his entry into “the world of guilt and sorrow”

Key Topics & Takeaways

• Adulthood as Dependability: Julian has graduated from college and thinks of himself as intellectually mature, yet he still lives with and depends upon the mother he treats with contempt. The episode’s opening definition of adulthood shifts attention from independence alone to becoming someone on whom others can depend.
• Convergence and Common Humanity: The bus, the shared stop, and especially the identical hats repeatedly collapse the distinctions the characters try to preserve. O’Connor turns Teilhard de Chardin’s hopeful image of convergence into a painful encounter with the fact that human beings share a nature even when social habits, prejudice, and resentment keep them apart.
• Prejudice and Performative Progressivism: Julian correctly recognizes the injustice of his mother’s racism, but his own moral posture is compromised by vanity and resentment. Sitting beside a Black passenger becomes partly a performance aimed at humiliating his mother rather than an act of genuine friendship or solidarity.
• Dark Grace: O’Connor’s moments of grace are not soothing. They arrive through shock, humiliation, violence, or loss. Julian’s awakening comes only when his mother collapses and the categories through which he has judged her are overwhelmed by the reality that he may be losing her.
• O’Connor’s Unsparing Moral Vision: The story refuses to let either the progressive son or the traditional mother hide behind the right ideas, social manners, or inherited identities. As Tim and Emily observe, O’Connor’s moral imagination subjects everyone to judgment, including positions and weaknesses she may have recognized in herself.

Questions & Discussion

• Is Julian actually more mature than his mother?
  Compare his education, political awareness, dependence, resentment, and treatment of his mother with the episode’s definition of adulthood as becoming someone others can depend upon.
• Why is the bus such an effective setting for the story?
  Consider how a bus removes control over who shares one’s space and forces racial, class, generational, and personal differences into physical proximity.
• What does the matching hat reveal?
  Discuss how the hat begins as the mother’s attempt to appear distinctive and becomes a visual sign that the people she places beneath herself are not as separate from her as she imagines.
• How does O’Connor transform Teilhard de Chardin’s idea that “everything that rises must converge”?
  Explore the difference between an uplifting vision of spiritual convergence and the painful, humiliating, even violent convergence that occurs in the story.
• What is Julian’s moment of dark grace?
  Consider whether the ending represents punishment, awakening, the beginning of repentance, or all three as Julian enters what O’Connor calls “the world of guilt and sorrow.”

Suggested Reading & Resources

• Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor
• A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor
• Good Country People by Flannery O’Connor
• Parker’s Back by Flannery O’Connor
• The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
• The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by T. S. Eliot
• “Faith in Man,” in The Future of Man by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
• The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor edited by Sally Fitzgerald
• Iowa Writers’ Workshop – O’Connor’s graduate writing program
• Andalusia Farm – Flannery O’Connor’s home in Milledgeville, Georgia
• My Name is Søren Kierkegaard by Tim McIntosh
• Devotchka
• Substack 
• Instagram