If you were to ask me what books influenced me the most, a song by Michael Card comes to my mind, So Many Books. The refrain is as follows: “So many books, so little time, so many hunger, so many blind; Starving for words, they must wait in the night; To open a Bible and move towards the light.” And indeed, the Bible (actually a collection of books and letters) has had the most profound impact on me, and yet it is not the only significant influence. There are too many other books to list, but my mind first flies to works (not in a specific order) by Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Flannery O’Conner and Graham Greene, Shakespeare and Milton, the Romantic poets (especially William Wordsworth), Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, John Steinbeck (without a doubt The Grapes of Wrath), Melville’s Moby Dick and The Scarlet Letter, Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man, but many, many more. Each text impacted how I think about myself and the world, even God, in some significant way. Yet, one author has appeared and reappeared as significant as I grew to adulthood, Pat Conroy.
I first learned of Pat Conroy while watching the movie Conrack (1974) on television with my mom when a teen. The book was titled, The Water is Wide, and it recalls in a pseudobiographical way his experiences teaching on Daufuskie Island, South Carolina. Students there were descendants of slaves, very isolated, and quite poor. During the time of segregation, the educational system didn’t make any real effort to help them. His dedication, kindness and efforts to love the children in his charge inspired me at my very young age and opened me up to the reality that racism exists and not everyone was as economically well off as me.
A few years later, I watched the Great Santini with my dad. The movie is modeled on the book of the same name. Again, it’s pseudobiographical about his coming of age in a Navy family with a hard charging and often difficult, if not also distant, father. Coming from a family with its own dysfunction, I related to some aspects of the story – if not in details, then in common emotions and thought patterns. Despite the family challenges in the movie, I was attracted to the idea of maybe flying one day in the military. My dad had been a Marine, and I always assumed I’d serve someday, too.
As high school was ending and my focus sharpened, I ended up with a four-year Army ROTC scholarship to attend the Virginia Military Institute or VMI for short. In current times, their tagline invites, “Don’t do ordinary,” and in many ways a cadet’s experience there is certainly anything but. One is challenged physically, but also mentally, emotionally, and I would argue, even spiritually. The Lords of Discipline is a 1980 novel by Pat Conroy that was later adapted in a 1983 film of the same name. Integrating his memories of being a Citadel cadet into the fictional story, it came out and I read it just as I was first considering attendance at a military college and visiting VMI. In a strange way, the book did help me prepare mentally for the rigorous culture of the school.
I’ve certainly read more of Pat Conroy’s works by now, but these three top my list. Sure, they are all fictional to some extent, but reading the books, they seem to intersect with many of my own experiences and feelings growing up, going to VMI, serving and teaching most often at-risk and undeserved Native youth in South Dakota. Throughout, you can often note subtle expressions of his own wrestling with faith.
In 2018, I got to sit at Pat Conroy’s desk when Kristine and I visited the Pat Conroy Literary Center in Beaufort, SC. It might seem a silly thing, but I was excited to do so. It was a highlight of my vacation to visit the museum and educational site that was opened in his honor and in the city that he held dear. The best books and works of art certainly have a way of helping to shape one’s life, and I think these books played their part in my own. They still do.
Yesterday, I came to think of Pat Conroy as the death of Robert Duvall was announced. Robert Duvall masterfully played the dad who was “the Great Santini” in the movie. I felt a pang of loss at the news. Duvall in that role as well as being cast as a police Field Training Officer, or FTO, in the crime movie, Colors, made an emotional connection and lasting impression with me as well. (I served as a police FTO in the same period that movie portrays, and the way he conveys wisdom to his rookie include lessons in such mentorship.) With all this, I think of these books and these literary and dramatic artists often, and his death brings a sense of loss.
Some people might discount or minimize my feelings about these men and their work, but to me, there efforts still play a part in who I became. Sure, they are only two of many influences, many which might have been more intimate perhaps, yet they remain special in their own way nonetheless. Perhaps it is exactly as John Donne wrote:
No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent;
A part of the main.
If a clod be washed away by the sea,
Europe is the less,
As well as if a promontory were:
As well as if a manor of thy friend’s
Or of thine own were.
Any man’s death diminishes me,
Because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
It tolls for thee.
Social dynamics, experiences, emotions, and even art connect us, and in the best of times, when we don’t get in the way, God uses that for our good (Romans 8:28). Even amidst our serious flaws, errors, or sin, we can be used by God to bless others without intending it.
Pat Conroy died in 2016. Robert Duvall, as I wrote, died yesterday. Yet, I suspect their work, reputation, and influence will live on in my life and the lives of others. Rest in peace, gentleman. And, thank you for using the gifts that God gave you.
© 2026 The Rev. Louis Florio. All content not held under another’s copyright may not be used without permission of the author. Scripture passages are from the NRSVue translation unless otherwise indicated.
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