As I write, it’s 6:05 on Saturday morning. In a few minutes I depart for Manchester/Boston regional airport. I’m heading home to South Carolina after eight days in New Hampshire at Thomas More College.

Yesterday I had the great pleasure of introducing my good friend, Fr. Michael Kerper, parish priest of St. Patrick’s in Nashua, as he led an afternoon seminar and then gave an evening lecture on the great American literary convert, Walker Percy.

Prior to yesterday’s events I had a very scanty knowledge of Percy. I had read Lancelot several years ago and had finished Love in the Ruins recently. The only of Percy’s essays that I had read was his wonderfully succinct appreciation of Kentucky bourbon, the reading of which warmed my Chestertonian heart!

Under Fr. Kerper’s guidance I came to understand that Percy’s literary approach was influenced not only by his Catholicism and by his reading of Aquinas and Maritain, but also by Kierkegaard, Gabriel Marcel, psychoanalysis, his medical and scientific training, and by personal tragedies, such as the suicide of his father.

Fr. Kerper has increased my appreciation of Walker Percy and my appetite for more of Percy’s novels. Perhaps, one day, alongside Chesterton and Belloc in the Inn at the World’s End, I might also get to meet this southern gentleman. Then, perhaps, and by the grace of God, we might come to realize that even the finest bourbon is  but a dim foreshadowing of the good things that the Good Innkeeper has in store.