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June 13, 2007
Walker Percy at Notre Dame
Video from 1989- Walker Percy's speech (with a rather lengthy intro) on being the recipient of the Laetare Medal. Via Matthew Lickona - I believe his brother Mark put it up on YouTube.
Posted by Amy Welborn | Permalink
Comments
Hey, thanks. Mark was in the graduating class; I was a punk high-schooler who had no idea what I was hearing.
Posted by: Lickona at Jun 13, 2007 6:57:20 PM
My brother Ron was in the graduating class too. The speech started a minor family fad of reading Percy, leading to a happy long-term habit for me.
Posted by: Kathy at Jun 13, 2007 11:48:35 PM
Walker Percy may be the most important American Catholic intellectual of the 20th century (yes, I know you Fulton J. Sheen was) -- his work is rooted in the philosophy of CS Peirce, which orthodox theologians are only beginning to exploit, and his status as a novelist of substance will endure outside the normal religious world for a long time.
OK, maybe I've rated him too high; there's a lot of brilliant american Catholics. That said, his work (both fiction and non-fiction) is substantive, edifying, and crucial.
Posted by: Irenaeus at Jun 14, 2007 1:30:15 AM
thanks for posting...an excellent piece!
m
Posted by: Matt at Jun 14, 2007 2:07:43 AM
Wonderful to see this, if not a bit sad too. A month after receiving this award, Percy learned that his cancer had spread to his aorta and spine. A month after that, he was headed to the Mayo clinic, writing his good friend Shelby Foote: "Dying, if that's what it comes to, is no big thing since I'm ready for it, and prepared for it by the Catholic faith which I believe." (See his wonderful collection of letters with Foote.) About a year to the day after his Notre Dame visit, he died at home on May 10, 1990, surrounded by family and friends, including Foote.
Posted by: quisnam at Jun 14, 2007 5:29:05 AM
Thanks for posting this, Amy. An essay by Walker Percy that I enjoyed was Why Are You a Catholic? in a book of essays I have entitled Why I Am Still a Catholic (edited by Kevin and Marilyn Ryan, Riverhead Books, 1998 -- it seems originally in Living Philosophies: The Reflections of Some Eminent Men and Women of Our Time, Doubleday,1990 according to the copyright page).
Posted by: Elena at Jun 14, 2007 1:39:09 PM
Thank you for posting this. I spent my childhood summers running around Covington, LA, at the very time that Percy was writing his later novels. He had a marvelous knack for evoking the atmosphere of small-town south Louisiana.
Posted by: Catherine L at Jun 14, 2007 2:22:11 PM
I just finished reading "The Thanatos Syndrome." It was lovely to hear him talk a bit about it.
Posted by: JaneC at Jun 16, 2007 2:21:11 PM
