In 1961, Flannery O’Connor sent a question to Roslyn Barnes, “the only scientist I am acquainted with,” about an intriguing phrase from the writings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. The Jesuit paleontologist wrote that “everything that rises must converge,” and while O’Connor could “easily see its moral, historical and evolutionary significance,” she wondered whether it was also “a true proposition in physics.”
O’Connor was taken with the French priest. “He was alive to everything there is to be alive to and in the right way,” she noted later that year. His enigmatic claim became the title of one of her most famous stories; she applied his proposition “to a certain situation in the Southern states & indeed in all the world.”
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