In foreign countries, the scholars mainly research on Flannery O’Connor from two aspects: religion and Southern culture. As a devout Catholic, she aimed to warn  people who lost their religious beliefs and values by her literature works. Robert  Derek agreed with that. He thought all her works were connected with original sins and salvation closely.

Some other scholars analyze her works from pine doctrine and religious metaphor. Elisabeth Revell pointed out in The Heresy of the Symbol: The Sacramental in Flannery O'Connor's Fiction that Flannery O’Connor’s viewpoints on novels were sacramental, and many of her works were  about rituals. 

In addition, several scholars thought Flannery O’Connor’s works not only promoted religion, but also reflected on the spiritual world of Modern Western society. Her bizarre Gothic style and grotesque characters are also what the scholars often mainly talk about. 

The scholars in China started to study Flannery O’Connor relatively late. In the late 1980s, the first commentary about Flannery O’Connor by Huang Mei appeared, which described the theme, characters and plots in her works at length. Throughout the whole research situation about Flannery O’Connor in China, they cannot help us understand her works adequately because of limited amount and separated subjects. Moreover, lack of research materials and delay in translation take responsibility for inconvenience to related researches. This paper aims to provide more thinking space and promote Chinese readers’ understanding of Flannery O’Connor’s works. 

A Good Man Is Hard to Find is a short novel written by Flannery O'Connor, in 1953. In the novel, A man named Bailey took his family from Georgia to Florida for a summer vacation. Though they survived in a car accident fortunately, they were all shot to death by the Misfit with his accomplices in the end. The story utilized the third-person narrator, centering on the grandmother’s perspective of events. It is a classic of her works which reflects the common religious theme in her works—sin, violence. death and salvation.

Though A Good Man is Hard to Find is easily understood on the surface, it is difficult for Chinese readers who don’t know its related religion views and philosophical views very well. To analyze and appreciate the novel better, the paper is made up with four chapters, of which the central thesis is rendered in two chapters between the introduction and conclusion. To start with, Chapter One is a brief introduction of Flannery O’Connor and her novel A Good Man is Hard to Find. Next Chapter Two and Chapter Three will clarify its religious theme in detail respectively with concrete perspectives: sin, violence, death and salvation . Lastly, Chapter Four is the conclusion of the thesis. This author hopes that this paper could be conductive to a  comprehensive and extensive understanding of Flannery O’Connor’s religious theme in current China. 

Chapter 2 A world filled with sins

In the novel, the author creates a world where everyone is born with sins, which is consistent with Original Sin Theory in Christianity. According to Genesis, Original sin, also called ancestral sin, is the Christian doctrine of humanity's state of sin resulting from the fall of man, stemming from Adam and Eve's rebellion in Eden, namely the sin of disobedience in consuming from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This condition has been characterized in many ways, ranging from something as insignificant as a slight deficiency, or a tendency toward sin yet without collective guilt, referred to as a "sin nature", to something as drastic as total depravity or automatic guilt of all humans through collective guilt.

In O’Connor’s life, great changes sprung up in America after the World War II.  Part of American people lost faith in human being’s honesty and kindness. They were skeptical about whether they could benefit from scientific technology. At the same time, with the Breaking of American Dream, the situation in America was pessimistic. Spiritual crisis and belief crisis are prevailing in America.  《好人难寻》中的宗教主题(2):http://www.chuibin.com/yingyu/lunwen_206269.html