“Beauty is our guide”: An Interview with Dr. Glenn Arbery

Born in South Carolina, reared in Georgia, Glenn C. Arbery grew up as a Southerner and a Protestant. His reading of Flannery O’Connor as a freshman at the University of Georgia began his journey toward the Roman Catholic Church. A convert at 25, he entered the Church at the University of Dallas, where he met his wife-to-be, Virginia Lombardo, and later took his Ph.D. in Literature and Politics. He has taught literature at the University of St. Thomas in Houston; Thomas More College of Liberal Arts in Merrimack, New Hampshire; the University of Dallas (through the Dallas Institute); and Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he held the d’Alzon Chair of Liberal Education. In 2013, he and his wife Virginia (also a Ph.D. from the University of Dallas) went to Wyoming Catholic College to teach Humanities, Trivium, and Philosophy. Dr. Arbery became President of Wyoming Catholic in 2016.

He has served as Director of the Teachers Academy at the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture and as an editor at People Newspapers in Dallas, where he won regional and national awards for his writing. In addition to numerous essays and reviews, he has published two volumes with ISI Books: Why Literature Matters (2001) and The Southern Critics (2010, editor). He is also the editor of The Tragic Abyss (Dallas Institute Press, 2003) and Augustine’s Confessions and Its Influence (St. Augustine Press, 2019). His novel Bearings and Distances was published by Wiseblood Books in 2015, and his second, Boundaries of Eden, was published in 2020 [Editor’s note: See CWR’s review by Chilton Williamson, Jr.]

He and his wife Virginia have eight children and twenty-four grandchildren. He spoke recently with CWR about conversion, writing fiction, and the challenges faced in orthodox Catholic institutions of higher education.

CWR: Joseph Pearce wrote a book titled Literary Converts, in which one of the themes of this book is that reading great Catholic literature can be a door to conversion. What was it in Flannery O’Connor that helped lead you to the Church?

Glenn Arbery: Part of O’Connor’s appeal was local, you might say. I grew up fifty miles from O’Connor’s Milledgeville, and as children, we knew the town only as the site of the state mental asylum. To be “sent to Milledgeville” was not a good thing. (It happened to my third-grade teacher.) As a freshman at the University of Georgia, I encountered the stories of a woman from Milledgeville in my class with Marion Montgomery, a novelist and critic who had known her personally. I cannot say that I immediately loved her stories, but I did like O’Connor’s scathing satire of the sources of my own frustration and impatience—for example, those self-satisfied Southern ladies like the Grandmother in “A Good Man is Hard to Find” or Ruby Turpin in “Revelation.”

Less comfortable was her exposure of her intellectual characters (such as Asbury, Hulga, Julian, or Hazel Motes), miserably enlightened beings who scorned the Christianity of their childhood and the atavistic prejudices embedded in many Southern conventions. This satire was at first too close to home. It’s hard to out-do the brilliance of O’Connor’s depiction of Asbury, for example, in “The Enduring Chill.” Having had his consciousness raised in the North, he wants to share raw milk at the family dairy with his mother’s black employees to show that he has overcome his prejudice. They won’t touch it and—with the dark humor typical of O’Connor—Asbury himself contracts undulant fever by drinking it. (For all the ironies, just read the story.)

What ultimately moved me (and by this time, I was teaching O’Connor stories myself) was the repeated terrible encounter with the Love that finally will not suffer the lies we construct. Her stories are divine comedies with classical tragic plots. She repeatedly shows us that we are as deluded as Oedipus: we think we know who we are until the shattering reversal and recognition of seeing ourselves in Christ.

CWR: In addition to being the president of Wyoming Catholic College, you are an accomplished novelist. Is there a tension between writing fiction and governing a school?

Arbery: Well, everybody around me is worried that I’m going to put them into my next novel. I’m kidding, of course—or I might be. The main tension is simply one of time. It’s not easy to write steadily when there are so many demands that naturally arise from running the college: frequent meetings, keeping up with donors (which includes considerable travel), composing a weekly email column for our mailing list, and so on. If I do find time, what I am writing might inform my approach to the workday and the day at work might find its way into the writing (never too directly, I hope).

But what Wyoming Catholic College is really doing—educating young people in the great books and ideas of the Western world—is not far at all from the underlying concerns of my fiction.

CWR: Your two novels have been published by Wiseblood Books, headed by Joshua Hren. Many of these novels deal with the complexity of being a Catholic in late post-modernity. Do you think it is more difficult to be a Catholic writer now than it was during the twentieth century?

Arbery: We are in the age of the “nones,” which means—I am speaking for myself—that a writer cannot assume the presence of a Christian culture, much less a Catholic one. How can the strange, initially alien world of Catholic belief begin to appear as real and convincing to people who have never seriously encountered it except in caricature? I don’t think that it’s more difficult to write as a Catholic, because ultimately you write from who you are. Is it more difficult now than, say, in the 1950s to get published in the mainstream houses if this identification comes across too strongly? I seriously don’t know.

O’Connor and Walker Percy had the great advantage of having their way prepared by heroic writers—especially Caroline Gordon—who had to earn their influence in the truly secular intellectual world of the 1930s and 1940s. Explicitly Catholic writers are published now in the mainstream. Look at Alice McDermott, for example, with a novel like The Ninth Hour or Ron Hansen with Mariette in Ecstasy or Exiles. Personally, I am most grateful to Joshua Hren and Wiseblood Books for publishing my two novels. Unlike McDermott or Hansen, I had no track record, and I do not know who in the climate of contemporary publishing would even have looked at the work of an unknown novelist in his 60s (at the time), especially one with the controversial subject matter of Bearings and Distances.

CWR: Much of your education and teaching has been at “Newman Guide” Catholic colleges and schools, that is, schools that have dedicated themselves to following the magisterium of the Church. What has been your experience of learning, working, and administering at these schools?

Arbery: Graduate school at the University of Dallas changed my life, but when I was an undergraduate at the University of Georgia, an ex-Methodist and would-be atheist, the idea of going to a faithfully Catholic college never crossed my mind. I did not even know a Catholic until I edited the English Department’s literary magazine in my senior year. But I was fortunate to have several teachers who were spiritual heirs of the Southern Fugitive-Agrarians—Marion Montgomery, James Kilgo, and George Martin. Fine, complicated Christian men, they never explicitly tried to convert me but they exemplified qualities very different from each other’s but all worthy of emulation. Their witness at a secular state university was crucial to me, and I might not have been on the road to Rome without them. God’s providence works everywhere.

What is immensely liberating about faithful Catholic schools, though, is that a student or professor need not always be fighting against ideological distortions. That does not mean we are in a bubble. As with fiction, “the world” outside what we believe and teach cannot simply be condemned and avoided. Our deliberate intention must be to open the depth and saving power of the truth to the world.

CWR: Wyoming Catholic College is one of schools included in the Newman Guide. What makes it unique?

Arbery: Lately, I’ve taken to saying that Wyoming Catholic College [WCC] is unique in the world, not just unique among Newman Guide schools. In addition to our Great Books curriculum, we also have a nationally accredited outdoor program. Our 21-day backpacking expedition for all incoming freshmen begins the month before classes start. Our students face the physical challenge of the wilderness, as well as the intellectual challenges of the classroom.

In everything we do, they draw upon the depths of their Catholic faith and try to bring it into harmony with what they learn about themselves and their capacities for leadership, as well as their experiences of prayer and the depth of liturgy.

CWR: WCC is located in Lander, Wyoming, a small town “Out West.” The western portion of the United States has traditionally been quiet, free, and sparsely populated. In recent years there has been tremendous migration, not only from California, but from throughout the country into the West, causing notable cultural, economic, and political changes. What is it like to live and work in the “New West”?

Arbery: In Lander, we have seen a good deal of migration from California, but I suspect that the larger tensions in the nation these days have made themselves felt in nearly every community in the country. Here, a strong political divide exists between the “woke” policies of some townspeople and the more traditional views of the older townspeople and, of course, WCC faculty and staff. This country was built, however, on the recognition that people will disagree on important things. We don’t need unanimity, but we do need a respect for the institutions that make disagreement livable, which means that we need more active political participation on the local level. That is certainly happening in Lander.

CWR: We live in a time in which the Church is experiencing deep tensions with revived radicalism and an aggressive traditionalism. How does WCC attempt to remain faithful to the “heart of the Church” during these times?

Arbery: It’s hard to find a touchier topic or one on which I would either need to say a great deal or very little. The latter strikes me as best. I was just talking at lunch with a senior whose thesis concerns the difficulties of evangelization when Catholics are so divided over liturgical practice. Historically (if the word applies to a span of 15 years), our college tends toward traditionalism, but not at the expense of our fidelity to the living church. Beauty is our guide.

CWR: Does WCC welcome students who are not Catholic?

Arbery: Yes, WCC welcomes non-Catholic students. We would love to have more, because we would love to have the winds of the Spirit that conversion always brings. How do we feel toward non-Catholic students who did not convert? There have been only a few, and they are wonderful people. Who can fathom the Providence of God?

CWR: As a Southerner, how do you manage the winters in Wyoming?

Arbery: I am more worried about our chaplain, Fr. Godfrey Okwunka, who came here directly from Nigeria and who saw snow for the first time in his life in late October. My 16 years in New England have put Wyoming winters in perspective. Instead of the gloomy days of overcast skies and accumulations of snow that get dirtier and dirtier until they melt in March or April, Wyoming winters are sunny. Temperatures might plunge well below zero on occasion, but it’s a dry, bracing cold, not humid and bone-chilling. Blizzards out here where the mountains meet the high plains have a sublimity you feel in a different way from the classic Nor’easters of the Atlantic coast.

As for the South, when I went back to the humidity of Georgia this past summer, it embraced me with undue familiarity, and although my complexion immediately improved, it was not unmixed with blushes.

CWR: What would you say to a Catholic parent who is confused about where to send his or her high school senior next year?

Arbery: Not too long ago, I wrote a piece for the weekly column I send out about an imaginary student going off to college. In one scenario, he goes to the state university, where his classes try to force him into a woke framework, his teachers criticize him for not using preferred pronouns for his classmates, etc. It is virtually impossible for students to come back untainted from the educational environment that prevails at most colleges and universities today.

The other scenario (no surprise) was Wyoming Catholic College. A recent graduate tells the story better than I can.