In response to:

The Parables of Flannery O'Connor from the April 9, 2009 issue

In Joyce Carol Oates’s article on Flannery O’Connor [ NYR, April 9], Hazel Motes in O’Connor’s Wise Blood blinds himself in both eyes with quicklime. In Brian Urquhart’s “What You Can Learn from Reinhold Niebuhr” [ NYR, March 26], Barack Obama’s comments on Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History originally appeared in an interview with David Brooks, “Obama, Gospel and Verse,” The New York Times, April 26, 2007.