Bill Wilson (University of Virginia) is at work on a book which will study writer and historian Shelby Foote's  book "The Civil War:A Narrative" . He will speak on the meaning of Foote's life and work, and of the historian's lifelong friendship with Walker Percy.

Patrick Connelly (Mississippi College) returns to the festival to speak on Walker Percy, race, and Confederate memory. Percy's unique perspective was shaped by his upbringing in the segregated South, his deep familiarity with Civil War history and Lost Cause mythology, and his post-conversion support for the Civil Rights movement. What does Percy have to teach us about contemporary racial concerns and debates over historical remembrance?

Walker Percy was raised in the last age of the aristocratic Old South culture, epitomized by his Uncle Will. He wrote in, and of, the New South -- the emerging South of the middle class, commerce, and suburbia. How and why did the changes come about? And how has the South changed further since Percy’s death 25 years ago?

Peter Augustine Lawler & Patrick Connelly
$10

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Peter Augustine Lawler, a political philosopher who serves as Dana Professor of Government at Berry College in Georgia. He is a former member of the President's Council on Bioethics, and author of fifteen books.

Peter Augustine Lawler

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Roman Catholicism—historically an outsider form of Christianity in the heavily Protestant South—informed the moral vision of Percy and Flannery O’Connor, two of the modern South’s best writers and most observant social critics. What did their Catholicism reveal to them about Southern culture? What did their Southern roots and Christian faith reveal to them about the discontents of contemporary America in an increasingly secular age?

Ralph Wood & Peter Augustine Lawler

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The late novelist David Foster Wallace once asked a very Walker Percy-like question: “Why are we – and by 'we' I mean people like you and me: mostly white, upper middle class or upper class, obscenely well educated, doing really interesting jobs, sitting in really expensive chairs, watching the best, you know, watching the most sophisticated electronic equipment money can buy – why do we feel so empty and unhappy?” Panelists will discuss the answers both novelists answered this question, with special focus on each writer’s insights into how modern people evade the question by immersing themselves in film and mass media.

Ari Schulman, Ben Bergholtz, & Robbie Howell

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