margaret turik and talking about evangelizing and that is not only preaching the christian message but seeing the christian truth and finding unexpected ways in which to see it. you mentioned flannery o'connor and her encapsulation of vocation as a writer. >> she had said at one point that the primary gift that she needed as a catholic writer was the gift of prophetic vision. it is vision, a capacity to see and to see prophetically by which she meant not the capacity to read the future but the capacity to see what is hidden. again, for her, it's primarily the hidden presence of god. our god is with us. but in our increasingly secular age, god is less and less visible. more easily forget able. god is becoming increasingly hidden. what she needs to do, she says, is find ways in this secular culture to impregnate stories with the presence of god. often the presence of god is best seen or recognized by the negative pointers that she embeds in her tacts. she forces you to face the seeming absence of god, the seeming void, this desert experience of our contemporary and secular culture. >> de