Overcome the alienation

I listen to the Kindlings Muse podcast and yesterday, in part 3 of an interview with Paul Elie about his book about Walker Percy, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton, Elie said an interesting thing. He was talking about an approach to the world that all these writers have in common:

The tradition these writers belong to constantly urges us out of ourselves, to
rotate out of ourselves, and thereby overcome the alienation.

This struck me as elemental to what I'd like to do with some of my stories. I'm working with a main character who is an outsider in many ways, but he's fighting that sense of alienation he often feels. I hadn't really found a way to articulate that until now.

There's more to the interview -- it's a good one.