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Before Walker Percy became famous as the author of novels like The Moviegoer and Love in the Ruins, he wrote a series of philosophical essays on the relationships between language, symbol, and human nature. Unknown to most readers, he assembled those essays into a coherent philosophical volume. But after more than a decade of trying to get it published, he gave up on it and turned mostly to writing fiction. In the intervening half century, some of those essays were published in other forms in his collections The Message in the Bottle and Signposts in a Strange Land, but now, thanks to the work of editors, the whole volume is appearing complete for the first time. It’s called Symbol and Existence, and it’s out now from Mercer University Press. Michial Farmer interviews three of its editors for this episode of Christian Humanist Profiles.