If a recent attempt to rework a Shakespeare play for the modern stage fell short, it’s hard to imagine Hollywood succeeding at turning the life of a deeply religious author of challenging fiction into a movie. But Christopher Scalia believes that a new film about the great southern author Flannery O’Connor does just that. The director and co-writer, Ethan Hawke, manages to depict O’Connor’s life while weaving in scenes from her stories and novels:

O’Connor created some of the greatest short stories written in English, in addition to two novels and countless letters that reveal the depth of her faith, the superiority of her craft, and the bite of her wit.

Hawke’s film, Wildcat, is marvelous, and he proves himself a worthy steward of O’Connor’s work and legacy. This film will thrill her readers and attract new ones.

One of the film’s strengths is that it consistently presents O’Connor’s faith on her own terms, including moments of doubt and struggle, in part by incorporating passages from her letters and the prayer journal she kept. . . . “Please help me get down under things and find where You are,” we hear her pray.

O’Connor’s gritty fiction bristles with off-putting characters and sudden, often violent depictions of the workings of divine grace. As she put it, “My own feeling is that writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable.” Wildcat’s mini-adaptations capture what she elsewhere called “distortion . . . that reveals,” the downright strangeness of the stories.

Yesterday, the beepers used by hundreds of Hizballah operatives were detonated. Noah Rothman puts this ingenious attack in the context of the overall war between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group:

[W]hile the disabling of an untold number of Hizballah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.

Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, focuses on the specific damage the pager bombings have likely done to Hizballah:

This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hizballah, but they will not have access to one of their hands. These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile.

Hizballah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hizballah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep [supply of recruits]. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but also because it draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

The overall challenge for Hizballah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to . . . roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hizballah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. . . . It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hizballah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes.