In a culture of narcissism that has shed the old man of sacramental Confessionals for the therapeutic circles of self-help, the form of memoir inevitably proliferates. The heap of scorn which I could so self-assuredly toss upon the genr—but, but, wait, I’ll keep these coals for myself, dear reader . . . for I too have so sinned, here, in “This Sickness is Not Unto Death,” a memoir (of sorts) of living with Lyme Disease.*

I've always been a bit ambivalent about the piece, mainly because it is so hard not to compose a kind of self-indulgent portrait that would portray “my struggle” as somehow special instead of part of what Flannery O’Connor would call our essential displacement. “In any case,” she says, “it is when the freak can be sensed as a figure for our essential displacement that he attains some depth in literature.” Two reasons prompt this revisitation: First, readers have written to express the catharsis that has come from the essai (attempt). Second, when I sat down and wrote the first draft I felt what seemed like a strange liquid draining from my brain in a kind of rare, momentary, but real relief. Weird but wonderful. Here it is:

This Sickness Is Not Unto Death Joshua Hren Dappled Things

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*This opening is a passage from my review of Abigail Favale’s Into the Deep, published in Dappled Things, where “This Sickness Unto Death” was published and then included again in the twentieth anniversary issue. Thank you to the editors for permission to republish here, too.

Speaking of memoirs and memoirs of Lyme Disease, if you’ve not read ’s The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery yet, it’s very much worth your while. I reviewed the book for The Lamp some years ago HERE.

More than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature makes its way into the world today. This my tenth book is dedicated to Colleen Hutt and Mary R. Finnegan, friends in literature and in life. The cover bears the painting “Woman Holding a Balance” in honor of my wife Brittney, who loves Vermeer.

Here in this PDF you’ll find the Table of Contents (which maps the authors this book tries to honor, from Henry James and George Eliot to Jane Austen and Joseph Conrad, Flaubert and Turgenev to Proust, Dostoevsky to James Joyce) as well as the book’s opening chapter,

More Than A Matter Of Taste Jh Opening

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a slightly different version of which was originally published over at Plough HERE.

All glory be to “I Am Who Am” who gives being beyond measure. To those who see the beatific vision and yet still bother to clear my bleary eyes—thank you. Thanks, too, to early readers (Jody Benson, Colleen Hutt) who coaxed the project toward its telos. I give great gratitude to: Mary R. Finnegan () whose editorial dialogue throughout the Dostoevsky and Austen chapters made way for marked refinements; the editors, typesetters, and designers at Word on Fire Luminor (, , Mike Fontecchio, Clare Sheaf), who lent precision to my sentences and circumspection to my interpretations and gave the words a beautiful form; all those editors of journals and magazine who published the essays that would morph into chapters. Finally, I send serious thanksgiving through the veil to the dead whose works of extraordinary artistry continue to reconcile us to being—whose books help us render justice to reality.

What does it mean to be a reader of good taste? How can we inhabit the moral imagination in a way that avoids heavy-handed moralism? How can we grow in prudential judgment and spiritual discernment while delighting in the books we get lost in? And can looking at the world through the “million windows” of the “house of fiction” really elevate or transfigure the lives we lead?

In More than a Matter of Taste, Joshua Hren explores these questions and presents fresh takes that possess timeless significance. Surveying a selection of fictions old and new, Hren brings a Catholic theological and philosophical vision to bear on good and great books, opening up their moral and spiritual depths. More than a Matter of Taste shows how a robust engagement with the quality of fiction raises the stakes beyond aesthetics into ethics and metaphysical truth.

Readers of every persuasion will find this book a trustworthy guide for what it means to read with moral clarity

“Joshua Hren has written an extraordinary book, learned and wise, offering an unbelievably rich tour through great writers and the thorniest debates about the role of the arts in our moral, political, and spiritual lives. Hren writes with sensitivity, insight, and wonderful stylistic flair. A joy to read.”

—Phil Klay, National Book Award–winning author of Redeployment and Missionaries

“Joshua Hren believes in the power of literature. Not to provide easy moral uplift, much less to ‘make us good’ in any simplistic sense. Great literature’s power, on Hren’s view, is a far more subtle moral force. It is a power that enables us to ‘see’ the human predicament as it truly is, to locate, in Hren’s words, ‘our current position on the continuum that swings from self-deceit to wisdom.’ More than a Matter of Taste gives us an astute critic exercising his powers at a very high level of attainment, and thereby making a rich and inspiring contribution to the current revival of the Catholic literary imagination. For this, we are all happily in Hren’s debt.”

—, Author of Beauty & Imitation: A Philosophical Reflection on the Arts

*Today, in anticipation of the publication of More than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature on May 11, Word on Fire issued this excerpt—“Truth and Falsity in the House of Fiction”:

In a passage that repays perpetual, lifelong revisitation, Simone Weil says that unless we are utterly vigilant, “the substance of our life is almost exclusively composed of fiction. We fictionalize our future, and, unless we are heroically devoted to truth, we fictionalize our past, refashioning it to our taste. We do not study other people; we invent what they are thinking, saying, and doing.”[i] As Joyce puts it in Finnegans Wake, “O, you were excruciated, in honour bound to the cross of your own cruelfiction!”[ii]

Proust pierces through this same insight in his early novel Jean Santeuil, a work that is often marked by an artistic immaturity that amounts to romanticization of his hero: “Of such a nature is hatred,” he says, that it “compounds from the lives of our enemies a fiction which is wholly false. Instead of thinking of them as ordinary human beings knowing ordinary human happiness and occasionally exposed to the sorrows which afflict all mankind and ought to arouse in us a feeling of kindly sympathy, we attribute to them an attitude of arrogant self-satisfaction which pours oil on the flames of our anger.”[iii] Such traps of subjectivities, such projections of our own pettiness, at times emerge because, says René Girard, people are “incapable of ‘putting themselves in another’s place.’ The novelist is able to reveal their helplessness only because he has experienced it himself and overcome it.”[iv] Fiction dramatizes falsehoods, lures us into believing them—and then dismisses them as delusions, in order to cure us of our proclivities to lie and to be deceived . . .

Read the rest of the excerpt HERE, and if you preorder a copy of the book HERE you’ll receive release-date delivery. Thanks as always for being here.

[i] Simone Weil, “Morality and Literature,” in The Simone Weil Reader, ed. George A. Panichas, 292.

[ii] James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 192.

[iii] Marcel Proust, Jean Santeuil, trans. Gerard Hopkins, 311.

[iv] René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero, 231.

Dear Readers,

James Joyce has long played a part in my fate, not infrequently in mystifying ways. For instance, having read the short story I composed for her creative writing class circa 2002, my professor concluded that I had set out to intentionally imitate Joyce’s style. The problem: I had not yet read him. But when I did read that musical prose what she meant became immediately clear, commencing a lifelong love-hate (though hate really is too strong a word) relationship with the exiled Irish genius. “The Scandalous Goodness of Joyce’s Samaritan,” the final full-length chapter of my forthcoming book More than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature (due out through Word on Fire on May 11, 2026) became something of a culmination—an interpretation that concluded more-than-a-decade’s worth of wrestling with Joyce, gathering together questions and conclusions found in “Fail Better, James Joyce” (America Magazine, 2024), “The Dumb Ox and the Good Samaritan” (Literary Matters, 2024) and elsewhere. But a concomitant fascination with the influence Joyce exercised over American Catholic or Catholic-adjacent authors such as J.F. Powers, Katherine Anne Porter, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, and Edward P. Jones led both to THIS essay on the interrelationship between Dubliners and Lost in the City and a well-attended seminar entitled “The American Ghosts of James Joyce,” hosted by the Collegium Institute at Penn State.

Okay, okay, enough already, right? That’s what I thought, too, until two further more-than-less unbidden Joycean epiphanies arrived. For some time something about Joyce’s retelling of St. Patrick’s battle with the Druids, which comes at a climactic moment of Finnegans Wake, tingled the tip of my soul’s spine. Far from Ireland, isle of saints and sages, self-exiled along the Swiss Quai de Lutry, James Joyce “installed himself on the little wall at the harbor’s edge” and, pondering the prospectively fool’s gold project that was the unfinished Finnegans Wake. He “spoke of St Patrick, whose intercession was indispensable if he was to complete the book, wherein he has the saint carry on a dialogue in Chinese and Japanese with a druid . . . He made no move to leave until the cold evening air began to chill him: ‘I follow St. Patrick,’ he said, pointing to Mrs Joyce, who was motioning to us from the platform of a streetcar . . . Then with a sigh, ‘Without the help of my Irish saint, I think I could never have got to the end of it.’”[1]

[[1] A remembrance of the Swiss writer, Jacques Mercanton, found in Potts, Willard, and Heritage Printers, Charlotte. Portraits of the Artist in Exile : Recollections of James Joyce by Europeans. University of Washington Press, 1979, 219.]

The fight between “Same Patholic” and the Archdruid Balkelly falls less than thirty pages from the end of Joyce’s massive comic masterpiece Finnegans Wake, commencing a dawning consciousness that moves us toward the conciliatory conclusion of Here Comes Everybody (HCE) and ALP (Anna Livia Plurabelle), whose conflicted marriage undergoes many metamorphoses throughout this Menippean dreamworld book.

Finally this past January an essay examining Joyce’s combat between Catholic realism and gnostic idealism emerged all at once, and—no jocosity—at the very moment when I was finishing the piece I received an email asking me to deliver a lecture on St. Patrick and Storytelling. (The essay, “Same Patholic’s” Jocoserious Faith: High Theology and Low Comedy in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, is out with Renascence right now.)

But the Wake is such an imposing and impossible novel, oblique and dizzying, dense and demanding. Why bother? What goods can come from persevering? With no definitive answers to these queries, I offer a kind of apologia for the Menippean masterpiece in “Finnegans Wake and the Foenix Culprit: Here Comes Everybody’s Original Sin,” which was just published this past week in LOGOS: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture. Copyright law prevents me from sharing the full thing, but here’s the opening, in case you too may be an original sinner who yet may believe and rejoice that the Fall was also a felix culpa, that the culprit may yet find resurrection, that (as Joyce puts it) “he is cured by faith who is sick of fate.”

*Typically I would not trouble you at such an hour, but the following has bearing on the strange truths made manifest during this set-apart Time.

Dostoevsky never said “Beauty will save the world”—not without circling the catch phrase with serious qualifications, not without putting the attractive prospect in the form of a question. I don’t care how many times the branding of the aesthetes’ industry—the T-shirts, the memes, the coffee mugs—repeat the pleasant fiction. Such mock-profundities make a platitude out of an intricate interrogation, reducing soulful searching to a nice little slogan. Dostoevsky most definitely did not say that all we need to do to be saved is look at beauty and be pleased by it.

Sed contra.

Early in Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, the eccentric and well-to-do Madame Yepanchina and her poor relation (the protagonist) Prince Myshkin are studying a portrait of Nastasya Filippovna—the heroine whose standout beauty is a recurrent topic of town gossip.

“Yes she’s pretty . . . very pretty even,” Madame Yepanchina grants. “‘Does that kind of beauty appeal to you?’ she suddenly addressed the prince.” “Yes . . . that kind . . .” he struggles to reply, finally managing “In that face . . . there’s a great deal of suffering.” He grants this “somehow reluctantly, seeming to be talking to himself rather than answering the question.”

Already here, early on, Myshkin’s musings complicate what beauty even means, and the novel establishes a mysterious relationship between beauty and suffering.

Read the rest of the essay (published today at Catholic World Report) HERE.

Dear Readers,

Faith in the Furnace of Doubt: Dana Gioia’s Visionary Poetics arrived at our doorstep. If you ordered a copy—and thank you again!—yours should show up any day now. I’m just so terribly grateful to be able to offer this labor of love—the yields of reading and teaching and writing on Gioia’s poetry and life for over a decade.

The Catholic University of America just published a short interview with Dana Gioia on the book and the state of poetry in our time. Here’s an excerpt:

Q: How does it feel to read Joshua Hren’s Faith in the Furnace of Doubt?

Dana Gioia: My reaction is complicated. Obviously, I’m enormously grateful to have such an intelligent and perceptive book written about my work. Who wouldn’t be? How many authors have such a brilliant book written about them while they’re still alive? I not only feel flattered but humbled.

My other reaction is astonishment. Reading Faith in the Furnace of Doubt, I was shocked by each chapter. The book told me things about my poetry that I had never consciously noticed. And they were all true! It reminded me of the first time I heard my own voice on a recording. Yes, it was my voice, but it sounded different than it did in my own ear.

What does this book offer that other books on your work have missed or neglected to focus on?

I’ve had three excellent short books published about my work. Each offered an intelligent and carefully researched survey of my complicated career. But Joshua Hren’s Faith in the Furnace of Doubt is something entirely different. It is more profound, ambitious, and penetrating. He goes directly to the intellectual and spiritual heart of each poem. Hren reads my poems in the context of the Catholic literary and theological tradition.

It would be hard to overstate how intellectually ambitious this new book is. Hren doesn’t not analyze me just as a contemporary American poet; he discusses me as part of two thousand years of Western culture from Virgil, Augustine and Dante to Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard, and Girard. Do you see why I said I felt humbled?

Read the rest HERE.

If you’ve not yet picked up a copy but you wish to, the book is available directly from Catholic University of America Press HERE, or via Amazon HERE.

More soon, on a number of events tied up with Faith in the Furnace of Doubt, including one at Chicago’s Athenaeum Theater in October of 2026, and the St. Irenaeus Institute’s Fall 2026 Gala.

Meanwhile, here’s the very beginning of the book:

Faith In The Furnace Of Doubt Opening

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What does it mean to be a reader of good taste? How can we inhabit the moral imagination in a way that avoids heavy-handed moralism? How can we grow in prudential judgment and spiritual discernment while delighting in the books we get lost in? And can looking at the world through the “million windows” of the “house of fiction” really elevate or transfigure the lives we lead?

We have no chattel gods to make our home;

We have our psyches where we burn and roam.

“Aeneas in Modernity,” a two line poem by John Martin Finlay contains profundities, and other than pointing out the obvious rhyme of “home” and “roam,” the parallel of household gods and psyches, I will leave to you further ruminations on its concentrated but expansive meanings. (The poem is included in Wiseblood Books’ Collected Poems HERE.)

Not long ago I wrote on Hermann Broch’s modernist masterpiece The Death of Virgil (1944-45) HERE]. Describing Aeneas as he flees burning Troy, shouldering his father Anchises, he speaks of “the divinely conceived figure in heroic human form, is it permitted to carry the father across the fires of iniquity . . . he is allowed to carry the one who conceived him.” That phrase, carry the one who conceived him, captures so startlingly the nature of tradition, of continuity across the generations. Not a few Catholic authors carried Aeneas to America. Here he is visiting Washington with Allen Tate:

Aeneas at Washington

—Allen Tate

I myself saw furious with blood
Neoptolemus, at his side the black Atridae,
Hecuba and the hundred daughters, Priam
Cut down, his filth drenching the holy fires.
In that extremity I bore me well,
A true gentleman, valorous in arms,
Distinterested and honourable. Then fled
That was a time when civilization
Run by the few fell to the many, and
Crashed to the shout of men, the clang of arms:
Cold victualing I seized, I hoisted up
The old man my father upon my back,
In the smoke made by sea for a new world
Saving little—a mind imperishable
If time is, a love of past things tenuous
As the hesitation of receding love.

(To the reduction of uncitied littorals
We brought chiefly the vigor of prophecy,
Our hunger breeding calculation
And fixed triumphs)

I saw the thirsty dove
IN the glowing fields of Troy, hemp ripening
And tawny corn, the thickening Blue Grass
All lying rich forever in the green sun.
I see all things apart, the towers that men
Contrive I too contrived long, long ago.
Now I demand little. The singular passion
Abides its object and consumes desire
In the circling shadow of its appetite.
There was a time when the young eyes were slow,
Their flame steady beyond the firstling fire,

I stood in the rain, far from home at nightfall
By the Potomac, the great Dome lit the water,
The city my blood had built I knew no more
While the screech-owl whistled his new delight
Consecutively dark.

Stuck in the wet mire
Four thousand leagues from the ninth buried city
I thought of Troy, what we had built her for.

Robert Lowell falls asleep over The Aeneid, and Dana Gioia’s “The Underworld” contains ready marks of Virgil’s influence, not least the epigraph “FACILIS DESCENSUS AVERNO” from The Aeneid: descent into the underworld is easy. But what of trying to make your way back out? I consider the sinews that bind Gioia to Virgil and a host of other elders in “A Classical Descent into a Contemporary Hell: Tradition and Talent in Dana Gioia’s ‘The Underworld,’” one of the final chapters of my book Faith in the Furnace of Doubt: Dana Gioia’s Visionary Poetics, forthcoming very soon from Catholic University of America Press.

Here’s a whole packet of contemporary poems featuring or figuring Aeneas, as well as an excerpt on Tate’s Aeneas poems from Allen Tate and the Augustinian Imagination by Robert Dupree, both of which I put together for my Catholic Imagination in Modern American Literature course at the University of St. Thomas:

Allen Tate Aeneas Ancient & Modern From Allen Tate And The Augustinian Imagination Robert Dupree

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Aeneas In Contemporary Poetry Handout

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At The University of Notre Dame’s 2025 Center for Ethics and Culture conference, the visionary poet, teacher, and translator Ryan Wilson delivered a rousing oration entitled “A Portrait of the Contemporary Poet as Aeneas” (his lecture begins at 43:50).

Finally, friends, not as some culmination but as a kind of footnote, I leave you with my own poem “How to Shoulder What Remains,” originally published in National Review HERE and included in my chapbook Last Things, First Things, and Other Lost Causes (which was published by Little Gidding Press and reviewed by S.P. Cooper HERE: “Echoes of Antiquity”):

How to Shoulder What Remains

Aeneas, more than any, secretly

Mourned for them all.

—The Aeneid of Vergil

Why do you haunt us, pious Aeneas,

Archaic hero, my brother?

You who transgressed hell’s hard orders

All to hear your father’s wishes.

Tell me how to, so beleaguered,

Shoulder well what can be salvaged

Of our patrimony’s body,

Even though it’s been beheaded

Like the Baptist Herod hated,

Even though Achilles’ son—

Master mocker, caustic Pyrrhus—

Has trespassed our inner sanctum

Poised to halt the sacrifices.

Hard to pray these Pater Nosters

When our Fathers lock the churches,

(Pilate’s looming litigation.)

Please Aeneas, will you teach us

When to flee and when to build,

How to hate all war but make it

When the holy laws are breaking?

How to rally wearied exiles

While revering dead companions,

How to mourn manlike in secret.

*In “Kitsch and the Common Good” I alluded, in passing to Heimito von Doderer, least known member of the Austrian Aesthetical triumvirate that includes Hermann Broch and Robert Musil. A few years ago I had the great good fortune of writing a review essay on von Doderer’s plotless masterpiece The Strudlehof Steps for The Los Angeles Review of Books.

Around that same time, Wiseblood Books was at work an edition of Heimito von Doderer’s The Demons, which was one of the most labor intensive books Wiseblood has ever dared. Surely our Deputy Editor Finnegan nearly lost her eyesight along the way as she read and reread the massive (1,600 page) tome! This Wiseblood double-volume of The Demons contains both an extended introduction by Martin Mosebach, “The Art of Archery and the Novel: The ‘Commentarii’ of Heimito von Doderer,” and an appendix with von Doderer’s lectures on the “Foundations and Function of the Novel.” Both of these works have been ably translated by Dr. Vincent Kling.

Though it would be difficult for any reader to do justice to Heimito von Doderer’s double-volume The Demons, Jonathan Geltner was just the man to do it. “One comes away from The Demons,” he muses in his Dappled Things review, “with the impression that a city may be experienced as an epic of neighborhoods, and as the story of the communion between city and hinterlands . . . Such is the value of aesthetic distance for novelistic technique: only the narrator, mediator between story and audience and thus master of the aesthetic interval, may give us the most vivid example of what it is like to perceive a beautiful order (cosmos) according to the whole.”

It is especially gratifying to see the beautiful book get notice, not only in print but also in this video review by Brock Covington; on the eve of the New Year, Covington’s fellow instagram influencer “literarianist” named The Demons in his Top-Five of 2025.

Anyway, if you’ve a little time, walk with me, down and then up, those Strudlhof Steps I’d mentioned earlier. There’s nothing like architecture, art that houses us and helps us dwell poetically on the earth. Think of Dekalog, by Krzysztof Kieślowski, wherein the disparate plots are all united by the apartment bloc where the action takes place. There’s nothing like public architecture that unites us as we walk in different directions, and elevates us even when we walk downward . . .

It was about a stately pace upward here, and it was about having to be drawn downward in an easy descent, not about a frenetic scurrying up and down the chicken ladder of purposes having no form.
— Heimito von Doderer, The Strudlhof Steps

ALTHOUGH HE WAS nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times, Heimito von Doderer is less well known than his fellow Austrian novelists Hermann Broch and Robert Musil. Von Doderer is a fascinating figure that we would rightly first countenance with wary circumspection. Once a Nazi sympathizer, von Doderer dubbed National Socialism “eine ehemalige Geliebte” (a former lover), but as Elizabeth C. Hesson has demonstrated in her 1982 book on von Doderer, Twentieth Century Odyssey, the controversial writer did an about-face against racist ideology after reading Thomas Aquinas and converting to Catholicism. As a consequence of this reversal, he rewrote the entirety of his massive 1956 novel The Demons, purging it of lingering Nazism and all such traces of what he called “second realities” — ideological distortions of the world as it actually is. If his novels are filled with useful idiots, this is in part an artful catharsis of his own failings. “My real work consists,” he confessed before his death in 1966, “neither of prose or verse, but in the recognition of my own stupidity.” As René Girard argues in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961), it is precisely the “victory over self-centeredness,” the “renunciation of fascination and hatred,” that is the “crowning moment of novelistic creation,” and the process can therefore be found in all great novelists.

Von Doderer went on to consider diminished perception one of the great enemies of the age. This loss of Anschauung (meaning both “observation” and “intuition”), he contended, results in catastrophic oversimplification of life’s plentitude and encourages mass hysteria. The events chronicled in The Demons climax in a slow-motion narration of divergent responses to the July 1927 riot, when the Viennese Palace of Justice was burned and nearly 100 people were killed. Amidst this crescendo, each of the characters must reconcile their interior consciousness with an event of consequence to the common good. His 1951 novel The Strudlhof Steps: The Depth of the Years . . . continues this aesthetic, even as the events it depicts occur chronologically prior to those covered in Demons.

READ THE REST OF THE REVIEW ESSAY, “A CARTOGRAPHY OF REDEMPTION,” HERE.

*“Kitsch and the Common Good” draws heavily on Hermann Broch, who featured largely in this recent post. Although the essay is not included in More than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature (forthcoming through Word on Fire in April of 2026), a number of the arguments found below crop up in different costumes in that book too. Recently, the Australian publisher Dispatch acquired the essay as a chapter in their book Notes on Kitsch, due out sometime in late 2026.

** Given the prospective misunderstanding that “kitsch” is synonymous with “low,” as if kitsch were low culture and art high, allow me to clarify that kitsch is crap in art, any art—high or low, popular or the preserve of an aristocracy or elite. And, as J.F. Powers argues, “God doesn't like crap in art.”

***One more note. Here’s Hannah Arendt on Hermann Broch’s conception of kitsch, from her long essay on and tribute to Broch from Men in Dark Times (they were friends and collaborators):

Given the imperative necessity to please and thereby to gain the attention of the greatest number, the aesthetic of the mass media is inevitably that of kitsch; and as mass media comes to embrace and to infiltrate more and more of our life, kitsch becomes our everyday aesthetic and moral code.

—Milan Kundera, “The Novel and Europe”

In his plotless masterpiece The Strudlhof Steps, Austrian novelist and Catholic convert Heimito von Doderer pauses at the edge of a forest to deliver an extended and elegiac encomium of nature’s beauties (“the wounds of the woods, torn open anew each spring by masses of water with their dull grinding”), only to end with an about face: if anyone “ever said outright that this spinach-green sublimity . . . was enough to turn his stomach, he would be considered an evil person.” Doderer’s playful portrayal of the relationship between ethics and aesthetics raises a real question: can our artistic tastes be (if maybe only in a venial sense) immoral?

Hermann Broch, another Austrian novelist (The Death of Virgil, The Sleepwalkers) and Catholic convert, argues that in our present age of “value-anarchy,” artistic expression dramatizes an “enormous tension between good and evil within art.” Broch calls good “that art which in its purest state is under the rule of the ethical.” Here he is not praising sentimental, moralistic uplift but rather hard-won portrayals of both a widening gyre of civilizational decline and the vestiges of goodness that counter dissolution. On the other end of the continuum, “the evil in art is kitsch.” Kitsch, a bastard child of the bourgeois age, is no harmless outgrowth of materialism. No: this elevation of “the mundane . . . to the level of the eternal” is akin to the “the mask of the Antichrist, who bears Christ’s features but is Evil nonetheless.”

Read the rest of this essay HERE.

The other evening I went to a retirement party for my dad, a somewhat loud affair held at a classic Milwaukee bar near the Brewers stadium, hosted by the engineering company he worked for for over over forty years. When he was given a chance to offer some remarks about his career in front of a packed room of colleagues, he stood up and said “The good book says where your treasure is, there your heart is also.” Holding back tears, he went mute for minute. And then my dad named his treasure—his wife and five children, before exiting the stage some seconds later. What a mensch.

I remember my dad waking up in the middle of the night to help me on my Sunday paper route, sometime circa age twelve, fresh ink staining the paperboy bag and dirtying the back of the family car. I remember my dad waking me in the middle of the night in (maybe) middle school, to help him on a paper route he’d picked up to pay the bills. We threw rolled newspapers at porches, trying (and sometimes failing) not to break the porcelain, the clay pots, the kitsch. It was kind of a blast. I remember my dad taking extra hours driving a cab come evenings, and soon thereafter getting to the point of paying for my mom and my siblings and our collective brood of eleven grandchildren to stay at Wagon Trail, the somewhat dilapidated but rustically beautiful “resort” in Door County, the same place on the Wisconsin peninsula where my parents had gone for their honeymoon—and where we went as a family for years and years growing up, a place that's since then burned down.

I remember dad showing me how to replace the busted gasket under my car hood, rosary ring unwittingly connecting a sparking circuit and the shock sending me flat on the street, on my back, dad laughing me back to life. He heaved an ugly orange family heirloom couch—a pull out mattress number that belonged to mom's grandma—who knows how many times as I moved from apartment to apartment, sketchy slumlord set up and so on for well over a decade. I remember this former janitor and painter of a Southside parish teaching me to blowtorch chipped paint off the peeling garage—and to dig up the driveway and pour concrete by hand instead of losing a fortune hiring a handyman. I remember my dad life-flighted from a mountain mine near Denver after an embolism nearly stole his last breath, how every year since has arrived—again, and again, and again, and again—as if gratuitous. Doctors said he should have lost his life. Speaking of losing your life (Matthew 10:39), he developed the clot in the first place from kneeling down in a South Milwaukee parking lot, helping (if memory serves) a woman find lost keys. I remember Bill Hren driving me and my friends to the local pool, laughing as “Little Michael” and I, spent and soaked, made “butt prints” on his back seat.

Was that before or after he and my mom got married? I was the ring bearer, and yes I was terrified of that day, for I feared (not least when I learned my suit had a “tail”) that I would turn into a bear. At the wedding reception our family friend Linda watched me while my parents danced and celebrated, the same Linda who now comes weekly to my own family’s home to help watch our children, just as she has since the eldest were little . . . oh I didn’t really know what a wedding was, but I knew something big was happening, that when the corsage pricked my chest and stayed stuck all day it was best to say nothing about the blood until bedtime.

That four-year-old stoicism was nothing compared to my father’s, for as a child he had to pull his own drunken father off his mother—and, knowing only an absentee dad, bereft of a biological model, he figured out how to raise us nonetheless. And the thing is, he didn’t stop. Last year when a flood left our basement moldy, I called to ask his advice about flooring, which I was bent on replacing myself. Several days later he was laying the tiles, armed with a circular saw and a mind lifetime-trained by mechanical engineering design, setting the floor of my son Søren's room through the ache in his arm that came covid-tide and never really went away. But someday, God, my dad will.

What a mensch, my God, have mercy on this man, give him true reprieve after so much labor, and take him, someday, to the eternal rest . . .

With the end of The Hôtel-Dieu in view, having made my peace with the prospect that the fiction inkwell may be empty after this last novel of THE ACCIDENTAL FAMILY is finished, a muse who’s been hiding for a long while has stirred new words toward The Death of Constantine, a novel I’ve been circling for some sixteen years now, ever since I took a course on The Decline and Fall of Ancient Rome during doctoral studies (the same semester I took a seminar on Joyce and, in between hundreds of pages per week from Edward Gibbon’s multi-volume tome, found in Ulysses the far reaches of fiction, what the art of the novel can really do). There I first delved into the Life of Constantine (Vita Constantini) by Eusebius of Caesarea and On the Deaths of the Persecutors by Constantine’s advisor Lactantius, not to mention the characteristically modern opinion on Constantine given by Jacob Burckhardt. There I first fell in love with St. Augustine’s City of God, one of my very favorite books to this day—alongside St. Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle. Research toward a novel on Constantine quickly took on a colossal scope, and, with no more than a few thousand words completed, I turned instead to more proximate fiction—contemporary stories less bound to fact-checks and the questions of a faraway civilization, even as we can make

(Later fascination with Shakespeare’s Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus seem tied, through the tradition, to the unwritten novel, as do great books courses I taught, later, on the Romans—from Virgil, Lucretius, and Livy to Cicero, Plutarch to De civitate Dei . . . and even Evelyn Waugh’s Helena stirred hopes of returning to Constantine.)

Turns out the age of Constantine is not so unfamiliar to the contemporary world. As in Constantine’s era, old forms are fading away and the foundations of the future are unsettlingly uncertain. (A cautionary aside from Theodor Haecker: “Does one sense the difference of the times? Here it is! I leave it to you to decide today whether the masses in a football stadium would listen to the verses of the Pandora or the Diotima and would arise, at least to honor the dead poets, as the masses of Rome arose for almost six hundred years, as soon as a verse of Vergil rang out?! One must be careful with comparisons.”) Turns out, too, that questions that flow through Constantine’s blood and soul are not so far from us, although some of them have roots in what may seem an esoteric, ancient quarrel over the relationship between political rule and theological truths, a problem probed by by Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies, Erik Peterson in “Monotheism as Political Problem” (which argues that inscrutability of the Trinity renders theological analogies of political authority impossible), and the controversial Carl Schmitt (for a brief consideration of the relation between the three, see Michael Altenburger’s essay HERE).

The implications of Christianity’s exclusivity for political policy continues to raise hard questions. The Donation of Constantine was a forgery, but this document feigning that the Christian emperor willed the western empire’s lands to the pope is caught up with theological-political problems that persisted through the centuries and have reappeared, shaped somewhat differently, in the postliberal Western world. If Constantine’s Donation was a forgery, his conversion to Christianity is far more vexing, far harder to write-off as fraudulent. Did he adopt the Christian God to gain powers that would unify the Roman empire? Did Constantine commence coercion—undermining genuine conversions and yoking Christian exclusivity with political intolerance—or is the familiar categorical condemnation of Constantine too neat, too pat, a caricature?

In The Divine Comedy Dante dramatizes the complexities of Constantine’s conversion. On the one hand he places the emperor in the Sixth Sphere of Paradise among the Just Rulers, for he did “give the Shepherd sovereignty, / with good intentions though they bore bad fruit” (Par. XX, 55-56). Now, in the afterlife, “knows the evil that began / in his good action does not harm his soul / although it has destroyed the world of man” (Par. XX, 58-60).

The Death of Constantine eschews hagiography and panegyric as much as it resists categorical condemnations. The novel inhabits Constantine’s deathbed consciousness during the last three days of his life. Bereft of strength, he faces new spiritual frontiers that a practical political life kept in the periphery. Submerged under a strange new stream of considerations, the emperor declines and then rises to glimpse a supermundanae civitatis. Returning, recalcitrant, to the mundane Roman world, he finds his quest unfinished at death’s threshold. Wrestling with his famed conversion, he wonders whether his subsequent decisions did more good than harm to Christianity, more harm than good to the Empire; his extended examination of conscience reaches back to pious Aeneas and foreshadows the conflicts and culture of the West—all of this circling Christ’s crucifixion, his descent to depths of hell, and what he did on the third day.

Movement back to The Death of Constantine would not have come without ’s commendation of Gustave Flaubert novel Salammbo (I’ve taught Madame Bovary and Sentimental Education, turning to Flaubert on the recommendation of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon), but have woefully (until now, thank you Lucas!) neglected his “historical novel” set in third-century Carthage. Lucas is working on a new novella that draws heavily on a historical character, and our conversation concerning historicity and artistic departures from facts have been markedly helpful.

Finally (for now), the Constantine novel would have languished on life support without a recent mesmerizing infusion from The Death of Virgil, a modernist masterpiece by Hermann Broch.

A convert to Catholicism and an exile (aided, variously, by James Joyce and Albert Einstein, the latter lending his Princeton house to the emigrant in 1939) in America, Broch started The Death of Virgil in 1938 in a German concentration camp, but completed it in the United States after an extended period of expanding and revising and perfecting that stretched into 1944. Broch even spent three months at Yaddo, the New York artists’ colony visited by Flannery O’Connor and Robert Lowell. He became a U.S. Citizen in 1944, right before the book was published (almost simultaneously in German and in English) to . . . “a mixture of awe, reserve, and critical misunderstanding.” In Broch’s book the Roman poet Virgil is summoned to the palace of his patron and ruler Caesar Augustus. There he passes through no small torment trying to decide whether he should burn his great poem The Aeneid, which he fears is filled with more falsification than truth.

Dana Gioia’s brother situates The Death of Virgil as a great avant-garde Catholic novel. Catholic—how so? Broch’s take on the dying Roman poet is tied up with Theodor Haecker’s Virgil, Father of the West, which argues that fatum is the “summit and perfection of Virgil’s theological ideas.” More than any other god of the classical world, Virgil’s Jupiter manifests characteristics that anticipate the full revelation to the gentiles of God the Father. When Jupiter decrees Aeneas’s fate he says that “sic placitum,” or, “it is decreed.” But, Haecker asks:

Who has decreed?—it is a dull mind that does not ask this question. Fate has decreed. But how? What is it, this fate? It is a sorry world that can be content with an impersonal, a neuter, fatum. It is decreed. By whom? By . . . Jupiter! The adventist paganism of Virgil and the Stoics in this phrase anticipated one of the revealed mysteries of Christianity, the beneplacitum Dei. Bene is the new thing, the evangel. The last, inevitable step taken by the pagan world was belief in a fate identical with the chief of its gods, with Jupiter. It belongs to the fullness of Virgilian humanity not to shrink from the seeming paradox, but to respect the mystery and to believe in a divine fate, without prejudice to the freedom of the will and the responsibility of man. This twofold mystery is “fulfilled” through Christianity in the beneplacitum Dei of the Triune God who is both the spirit and the life, a beneplacitum Dei as inscrutable and incorruptible as the old fate, but dark, not through darkness, but through excess of light, and bringing suffering not through arbitrariness but from wisdom—not mere perfect justice but the very flame and fire of love (88-89).

Haecker’s Virgil anticipates the Christ with a messianic yearning on full display in his Fourth Eclogue. As T.S. Eliot suggests, though Virgil literally composed the eclogue as a gift to Polio marking his son’s birth, this does not preclude the possibility that the poem also prophecies Christ; the poem does so—Eliot suggests—even if this was not Virgil’s intent. To cite just a several messianic passages that are strikingly similar to the Hebrew Prophets, the Eclogue promises that “the cattle will not fear huge lions,” a passage that parallels almost perfectly with the Prophet Isaiah’s anticipation that “The calf and the young lion will grow up together and a little child will lead them” (Isaiah 11:6). “ . . . under thy rule what traces of our guilt yet remain, vanishing shall free earth for ever from alarm. He shall grow in the life of gods, and shall see gods and heroes mingled, and himself be seen by them, and shall rule the world that his fathers’ virtues have set at peace . . . The snake too shall die, and die the treacherous poison-plant . . . ” I could go on . . . Fascinatingly, in his Oration to the Saints, Constantine too invokes the Fourth Eclogue.

Whereas the Virgil of Haecker and Eliot and Broch anticipates the Christian dispensation prophetically, The Death of Constantine treats the correlations and contrasts between the pagan and Christian worlds retrospectively, so that Constantine becomes the site of warring visions in the manner of Flaubert’s The Temptation of St. Anthony. Now “I am no prophet — and here's no great matter; / I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker, / And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker, / And in short, I was afraid,” but this novel seems like the kind of thing that will ask many years of hours. And yet, surprisingly—atypically, for me—instead of finding fear, here, at the start of a new year, I’m more grateful than I can say to see the back burner turned beyond simmer, to see for the first time a real congealing, a coming-together of the right rhythms, the commencement in earnest of a novel that may be a lifetime in the making—and may never find a finished state . . .

A draft-stage excerpt from The Death of Constantine: A Novel

Spent like coins that could find no purchase beyond the more familiar roads, Constantine’s eyes fixed on the scar, a gash on the slave who stared back agape, lips arching out as if caught in sedition and punishable by death on a Roman afternoon. He stared at the unbloodied slit and exhaled as the slave lit the wick and his breath nearly broke the fledgling flame before it caught, Vestal almost in its fierceness, mirroring the sun’s silent ascent. He wished to ask the stranger, visitor, slave to whom he was now beholden, whether he’d been marked before the law forbidding men from branding the human face. He did not ask. He did nothing—or tried to. To speak was to spend too much costly life breath, to risk that the next breath might bring death. And his question, he knew, was born of no love—was begotten of nothing but vanity, that violent tyrant he served like a sycophant, flattering and simpering after forever, damned to libido dominandi. As if he were some prophesied savior, the set-apart protector of the set-apart face made in the image and likeness of God. Feeling already, before the final breath, the stiffening stretch of rigor mortis, ready to take his place with the Apostles (the eternal valley was beyond the possible), he could not tether his temper to justice. Incapable of raising his right arm and nursing every rise of his sunken chest, he could not track down the criminal who scarred the slave who served the emperor’s final hours. When the waning crescent of a dying moon scar—blood moon, red moon, troubling omen—had seared into his soul’s back pages, Constantine saw the slave’s shocked face there, a gardener he’d last seen during a campaign made by way of Nicomedia. Nicomedia no medial place now but—his lung lurched—a final destination. No way station en route to the Jordan where he wished to sink into blue fluidity—sacred reflector of the sole sun that filled the river’s immense banks with a thousand pinpoints of coined golden light. There where he might have sunk in contrition, crying like his mother Helena when she found the flotsam wood of the true cross, the sweat of his agonies and the dirt of his rule and the dried blood of his authored murders awash downstream, unseen on the surface of the big river that drowned his pride. There. There. If he could only stay there, where he could shoulder the bust—his boasting countenance and cleft-chin, his aureole hair and sanctified eyes—and hurl it into the gulping stream, the weight of stone, the weight of his head, colossus carved from the world’s hardness, eyes on the otherworld’s rays that underwrote what arms, what rage, what man stern and sure in the Chi Rho, conquering in this sign again. He saw it again at the Milvian bridge, a midday cross above a molten sun—a caution to any who would dare, like Maxentius, to cross and make claims to the throne. Saw the sign eclipsed by the colossus, the massive head carved from the world’s hardness, the sculpture that when disposed of and drowned would raise the Jordan’s water levels and flood the farmers’ nearby fields, ruining the autumn’s forecast harvest. Everywhere else there was always his arrogance, wherever his feeble mind wandered in dreams like Aeneas cast out of Troy and confused, fate’s fugitive, Constantine—elephantine in a commanding caravan, camels spitting in the eyes of beholders come to pay the emperor homage as he conquered whatever ruin remained of the world. But here he was in the district of Eusebius, that nobody of Nicomedia, that one among the many bent on slitting a lifetime’s hard-won impossible unity into cut scraps of misshaped glory, divvied and gripped by rivals of his rule. The colossus would last far longer than he would.

The gardener repeated, breathing through his nose, the same anecdote he had last time told over the emperor’s barely-suppressed laughter—a revolt of hilarity he’d crushed in his heart. The tale of the abdicated emperor Diocletian, who when summoned to assume again the royal purple, the richest dye, said he much preferred the company of cabbages—their purpled culture surer than Rome, their cultivation a cultus of its own. Chosen of Jupiter to slave of Sol. “And did he truly mean cabbages? And does he have any tips for me?” the gardener asked buoyantly. But Constantine could not now share a small laugh though this time he willed with all of his powers a lighthearted indulgence of humor that could break the certain victory of death—jealous, gluttonous, anonymous death—death that played with him now like a lion, tickling its tail across his red nose and faceless, facing the Colosseum’s crowd, roaring even before devouring the dumbed-down mortal prostrate on the floor, sure to seize and sure to triumph—lossless death of the old dispensation before the Savior dulled its sting. Baptized into his death the monk muttered when the emperor had asked him to unveil the mysteries. Constantine tried to raise his right hand to summon a priest, a bishop, a believer, but only two fingers writhed like worms before, barely rising, they fell. He’d wagered against the grace of the waters that would wash the sin-stain from his soul at the threshold, not risking the rite any earlier than necessary to stave off the chance that he’d fall away again, mar his soul like the scar on the slave, pollute the ablutions’ purification.

Master interpreter of two raised fingers, the slave obeyed the ruler’s slightest gesture, lighting two wicks at the base of the bed, quenching one that dared to go out and swapping it for a surer stick of wax, twisted and strong as a Solomonic column. The flame licked the red-blown glass, gasping, glowering and glowing like a human heart, and the emperor at his predestined end felt the room creaking and circling like a ship, capsizing at the Tiber’s open mouth, muscles fluttering too fast for his mind, too fast for peace—you Roman, you remember you are only a man you Roman, he remembered—his muscles moving too fast for his strength and even surpassing the palpitant flames, the contained red ire of universal anger contained, with his reign, by the dying empire whose ruins ran mocking in a fevered nightmare that showed him his worm eaten skeletal remains. His own neck bent on the pillow but barely—not like the crucified Galilean, asphyxiated and plaything of gravity—his own ear nearly touching the chest where he heard, hidden behind the rib columns, the beating red muscle trying to keep pace, a votive candle forgotten in a cavern kept by the solitary monster Cacus, keeping vigil in miniscule quivers, he murmured and shivered in the world’s wide cold, too old to rise from the bed that would in time become his bier.

What has sanctity to do with poetry? I brush this question lightly in “The Silence of the Poets,” a chapter from Faith in the Furnace of Doubt: Dana Gioia’s Visionary Poetics, and pressed into it repeatedly this past semester, when I taught a socratic seminar on St. Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle through the indispensable St. Irenaeus Institute; her spiritual masterpiece regularly relies on poetic images to clarify subtle or unseen realities. That inhabitation of Teresa’s text with some eighteen students in an old Eastside Milwaukee living room was one of the great graces of my life. Each session was filled with excellent questions, students taking seriously her invitation into the difficult goods of divine intimacy, and not a few laughs from the depths.

In a passage that contains some of St. Teresa’s most beautiful mystical metaphors, she distinguishes between different kinds of union with God:

“We might say that union is as if the ends of two wax candles were joined so that the light they give is one: the wicks and the wax and the light are all one, yet afterwards the one candle can be perfectly well separated from the other and the candles become two again, or the wick may be withdrawn from the wax. But here it is like rain falling from the heavens into a river or a spring; there is nothing but water there and it is impossible to divide or separate the water belonging to the river from that which fell from the heavens. Or it is as if a tiny streamlet enters the sea, from which it will find no way of separating itself, or as if in a room there were two large windows through which the light streamed in: it enters in different places but it all becomes one.”

When our union with God is complete, it is as if we cannot tell where we end and God begins, where God begins and we end, even as we know that we are not God.

But at the end of that very same section, remarking on the limitations of metaphors, she says that “these comparisons make me smile and I do not like them at all, but I know no others. Think what you will; what I have said is the truth.”

My essai (attempt) “Poetry and Sanctity,” commissioned for the latest issue of Word on Fire’s magazine, tries to trace the relationship between mysticism and metaphor, the human imagination and holiness, and relies not a little on St. Teresa’s friend St. John of the Cross. Read the essai here (shared with permission from Word on Fire) . . .

Poetry And Sanctity Joshua Hren

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Lauda Deum. As part of my position as Scholar-in-Residence of the St. Irenaeus Institute, this week I have been on a writing residency in Bay View, a neighborhood on the South side of Milwaukee, building The Hôtel-Dieu: A Novel—stone by slab by floor by pillar by mosaic ceiling tesserae. (Not far from where I am staying, over one hundred years ago, Polish immigrants did something far more remarkable: they built the Basilica of St. Josaphat from the refuse of a razed Chicago Customs Office.) Milwaukee has long been one of my muses, and dwelling here in the city’s heart has made structure and architecture emerge and has given form to thematic threads. I’m roughly 3/4 of the way finished. It’s always incredible to watch the way things congeal unexpectedly during these set-aside times of immersion. Things seem to speed up. St. Thomas Aquinas gets at this phenomenon in Summa Contra Gentiles: “a body which tends to its proper place by natural appetite, moves more vehemently and faster as it nears its end . . . that which tends toward something is not moved to infinity [nor to an infinite regress!] but tends toward something determinate.”

Don’t get me wrong. There’ll be plenty of determining and refining and finishing to do in the coming year, but what a gift to inhabit that blessed vehemence!

Last December, at almost exactly this same time of the year, the Cluny Institute invited me to be their inaugural Writer-in-Residence and I am still overcome with gratitude to Luke Burgis. This year I send thanks to Mary Finnegan for helping to clear my Wiseblood schedule as well as Aaron Ebert and Joshua Miller of the St. Irenaeus Institute, and give thanks not least to my wife Brittney—to whom The Hôtel-Dieu is dedicated—for her sacrificial insistence that I write. Thanks all around!

Happily, on this final day of residency, I just received a book contract from Angelico Press, who will publish the novel in Spring of 2027. (It’s funny how amidst the rhythms of midlife with children, that date feels like it’s basically next month!) +AMDG+

The Hôtel-Dieu is the final novel in a trilogy entitled THE ACCIDENTAL FAMILY. The trilogy begins with Infinite Regress and includes the stand-alone novel (and sequel) Blue Walls Falling Down. Elements of the book have been around for a while. Per the discarded Chicago Customs House analogy: an earlier version of a section of this novel, “She Scarce Is,” made Top-25 in a Glimmer Train contest in . . . 2009, and is now further polished and grafted into the architecture of the Hôtel!

The Hôtel-Dieu: A Novel. Forthcoming in Spring of 2027 through Angelico Press.

Determined to save his future with Stella from the money strains that marked his parents’ marriage, Blake Yourrick works as seasonal manager of an Amazon fulfillment center in Troy, Michigan while learning to code on the side. Instead of surprising his fiancé with news of financial stability, he nods off at the wheel as he returns to Milwaukee, hitting and killing a young boy who runs out in front of the car. Or does he? Even as cops and a coroner tell him otherwise, Blake begins to live as though the possibility is the reality. He casts himself out of society and enters the homeless underworld, living in a Pabst Brewery grain elevator that has been converted into an EZ Self-Storage.

When an act of self-defense stirs Blake out of hiding, he begins work at the Hôtel-Dieu, a house for impoverished addicts and sick patients presided over by its founder Father Marto, a father figure to the Yourrick children. When Blake’s actual father Garrett enters “second childhood” early and becomes a resident at the fledgling Hôtel, his neediness forces the Yourrick siblings to face a lifetime of smoldering grievances that stand in the way of reconciliation. Blake’s brother, Max, a psychologist-turned-firefighter and volunteer at the Hôtel, watches his child support payments underwrite his ex-wife Haimavati’s best-selling study, Monogamy as Monomania: Expanded Edition. Once the pious child and faithful daughter, their sister Dymphna keeps her distance, losing herself in stringent yoga detox and drunken binges that end in blackout.

Devastated by the murder of her son’s father and refusing contact with her own family, Stella slowly opens back up to Blake. But even as their relationship revitalizes, the Hôtel-Dieu’s funding is called into question. Complicating their conflicting loyalties, Dymphna resurfaces in California and makes the couple an unexpected offer. Blake and Stella must choose between the heart of the city and a new life in obscurity, must discern the difference between escape and total abandonment.

Thanks as always for being here. Here is a draft-stage excerpt from The Hôtel-Dieu:

An Excerpt From The Hotel Dieu Jh

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( . . . )

Blake dodged the descending leaf whose peripheral fall lit in his brain like a firebrand, a flash of flame, translucent gold by the setting sunlight in the rained-on weeks of early October in the outskirts of the city of Milwaukee, returning from Troy, Michigan in the blue Buick Grand National he’d borrowed from Father Marto—a beater left by a deceased donor. Blood donor. Look into it. Another way to make money.

Yawning and pinching his cold earlobe Blake dodged another leaf. When the brakes grated against the car’s spinning wheels they seemed to stop the world’s spinning, everything suspended, still life, a little leaf, papery and brittle, already dead, bright where the light pierced like an X-ray shot through the clay-color, already dead, outlining the spine and the veins, what held together whatever remained of this already dead and wind-beaten refuse, ubiquitous, he thought, apocalypse—thousands either falling or gathered in mass graves under the maples, the century-old trees that lined the side street like noble sentries not showing they cared if they did at all as their countless children piled in plain sight and decomposed, the burnt umber whiskey scent stronger than the rank mold beneath, wafting through the cracked car window as Blake swerved to avoid the fall, the last leaf of the long-armed maple, hardly a legitimate leaf any longer but a stem with the jagged, shard-like edges of a child’s poorly made paper airplane, dry enough to papercut your palm if you reached out to touch the falling colors.

Before the light that struck the dashboard a boy leapt out from behind an orange cone, his blue jean legs a bridge as he lunged, his hair a yellow wave his mouth a hole his voice so soft too late the wheel spun against pointless cranks against the crack and thump and then nothing, no taking back the boy a sack against the bark the car still angling across what abyss the car cut short the gray slab curb, the anger of the engine spinning, designs he can’t discern no God now take me God now take me too against the day now take me now instead of him the boy slumped in the fresh dug clay the concrete mixer poised to fill the day after today—tomorrow.

A thump and a child’s tenor scream cut short, the scream mingled with screeching tires, the sound of a scared and terrifying eagle putting fear into a predator as her children are stolen from the unguarded nest, vulnerable so far below while she returns with the day’s found food, too faraway to be of any use. Waking on the side of the street, car engine still whirling, idling, a pile of construction cones kept the grille from denting the century-old maple. Blake could not see past the stars that burned into the backs of his eyelids, a small but startling one forming as if from nothing, hurtling, now, to the earth like a comet, dust mating with cold clouds in a dense knot distant in the galaxy, then falling fast from the faraway sky and turning everything back into dust.

Deo gratias, Faith in the Furnace of Doubt: Dana Gioia’s Visionary Poetics just received its second endorsement, this one from Jessica Hooten Wilson, Fletcher Jones Chair of Great Books at Pepperdine University, who found that:

“Without exaggeration, Dana Gioia is one of America’s greatest living poets and his work merits the attention that Joshua Hren gives in this book. You will enter a ‘School of Athens’ in written form with Gioia at the center pointing upwards and out. Hren highlights in gold all the threads of our tradition through the tapestry of Gioia’s verses, so you do not miss the illumination.”

You can preorder the book HERE for only $24.95. ($24.95 is nothing to sneeze at, but I remain so very grateful that CUA did not consign Faith in the Furnace of Doubt to some back corner of a library labyrinth by giving it a typical academic press price tag of $95.24.) Meanwhile, here’s a free excerpt—a chapter called “The Silence of the Poets.” Thanks so much for being here:

The Silence Of The Poets From Faith In The Furnace Of Doubt Dana Gioia's Visionary Poetics By Joshua Hren

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Circumscribed by a narrow definition of politics (as the politics of the day, as electioneering, as reductive partisanship and backroom deals in high places, for instance), many of us eschew the political—as if we could escape it. But what if we are “political animals” by nature? As Aristotle puts it in his Politics, the man “who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god.” Reeling from the corruptions of our shared society, too many of us retreat into individualistic bunkers, trying to become gods and ending up as beasts.

Fine, you say, with hesitation in tact. But a “political” novel? The novel would seem to be the least political of art forms. Isn’t one of the treats of reading a good book that you retreat into pleasant subjectivity—a kind of pleasant private dream? Superficially, I suppose, but during this retreat any novel worth its salt broadens our horizons beyond subjectivist strictures. Alright, alright. But what is politics without imposed ideas and ideologies? Wouldn’t a “political” novel be another name for propaganda?And wouldn’t ideas inevitably poison a work of art? Who would willingly subject himself to a thesis-driven novella whose purpose was to prove the now-pat notion that “the personal is political”? Oh, yes, that sounds awful. But the novel doesn’t prove theses. Stories may make “arguments” through what , in Beauty and Imitation, describes as a poetic syllogism. But as Joseph Epstein says in The Novel, Who Needs It?, when the novel “turns facts into ideas,” it does so in a way that tunes our minds and our hearts together.

Anyone who wrestles through and reckons with the political in a novel runs the risk of “ruining a novel with ideas.” At the same time, a representation of human life bereft of ideas, scrubbed of conversations about politics (and religion, that other topic we are supposed to politely avoid) would falsify, because, as rational animals with a marked ability to be irrational, we are often intensely caught up in ideas. On the same theme, Irving Howe rejects the notion that ideas “invariably contaminate a work of art,” for when the novel is at its best “the ideas it appropriates” with “such intense heat” are “melted into its movements and fused with the emotions of its characters.”[3] Insofar as art is political, insofar as it probes our civic strife and digs down into common goods that transcend our subjective strictures, the novel incarnates whatever ideas it incorporates or interrogates with intense heat.

You can imagine my grateful surprise, then, when Alex Taylor argued, in his review of Blue Walls Falling Down, that “Any reader looking for a political novel par excellence could not do better than to turn to the streets and souls within these pages to witness the political animals that human persons are, from birth to unnatural death.”

I give thanks from the depths for “A New Birth of Freedom.” Read the full review here:

Ec 37 2025 Winter Sm At Bwfd

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OR, read the review here:

Ec 37 2025 Winter Sm At Bwfd

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[1] *This part of my post includes a reworking of my essay “The Novel is Dead! Long Live the Novel!” a review of Joseph Epstein’s The Novel, Who Needs It?, which originally appeared in New Polity and figures into my forthcoming book More than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature (Word on Fire 2026).

René Girard, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 299.

[2] Joseph Epstein, The Novel, Who Needs It?, 40.

[3] Cited in ibid., 41.

+AMDG+

This has been a banner week!

First, I received this amazing endorsement for Faith in the Furnace of Doubt: Dana Gioia’s Visionary Poetics, forthcoming from CUA Press in December-January:

“What an extraordinary experience to enter Joshua Hren’s Faith in the Furnace of Doubt as he reveals what the Catholic poet Dana Gioia has offered us over a lifetime of writing some of the finest, sharpest, and at times haunting pieces in contemporary American literature and the role of the committed Catholic poet. No wonder that Hren, himself a gifted Catholic writer, undertakes to reveal this Dantesque underworld in a way few others would dare to follow without acknowledging God’s grace. Along that road Hren invokes Seneca, Virgil, Augustine, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, Shakespeare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, to name a few. Reading and pondering these pages has been a haunting, necessary experience like few others, and I am grateful to see the well-earned flickering light as I exit the refining fires of that tunnel.”

-Paul Mariani, Boston College, author of Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell, and many others

Then, Bishop Daniel Flores agreed to read the new Spanish translation of my book Contemplative Realism: A Theological-Aesthetical Manifesto with an eye towards writing an endorsement for the book.

And finally, I signed a contract with Catholic University of America Press for my eleventh book, Testing the Spirits: Finding Faith in Contemporary Fiction, due out in 2027:

Testing The Spirits Publicity Announcement

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P.S. This past Monday, before dawn, I made a pilgrimage to Holy Hill, a local basilica and Carmelite monastery. There I went to confession and early Mass and venerated the relics of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. I of course cannot offer a certified proof that she is behind the graces of this banner week, but I would be a fool not to suspect that my friend is letting fall rose petals from paradise.

Having been caught up in the deep joys and peculiar perils of literary culture for a long while now, I’ve witnessed countless deleterious rivalries defined by envy and ressentiment, and have seen these mimetic tensions lead critics and artists to conduct cold wars or take-downs fueled by pent-up spleen. Granted, sometimes critical appraisals of others’ work comes from clear-eyed and charitable weighing, not enmity. Granted, sometimes detachment is just what’s due; sometimes distance is the saving resolution. And yet—o happy chance—imitation can also take the form of “good rivalry.” A great artist is enlivened, not threatened, by another great artist’s work. A great artist contemplates a good artist’s work with magnanimity; beholding there both merits and deficiencies, he sees how he might riff on or surpass another’s standout achievements, advancing the art in a way he never could have had he not studied his forebear or neighbor with care—had he tried to be wholly original and make something great ex nihilo.

In Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, Henry Adams warns us not to get caught up in the sui generis singularities of any given cathedral: No, “one’s architectural baggage must be opened. Neither Notre Dame de Paris nor Notre Dame de Chartres is quite intelligible unless one has first seen Notre Dame de Mantes . . . ” After absorbing the splendors of all three we can “understand how, in this triangle of churches only forty or fifty miles apart, the architects, watching each other’s experiments, were influenced, almost from day to day, by the failures or successes which they saw.” gets at this chemistry of proximate imitation in his First Things essay “The Death and Life of Bohemia,” where he observes that “When artists—in this case, musicians—are in close proximity, they push each other, and in turn push and provoke and excite their audience and fans. Something like this happened in Renaissance Florence, where each workshop dared the others to make something sublime. Proximity matters. Someone’s playing at the venue down the street.” He argues that “[c]reative scenes are competitive and mimetic. Rivals are centrifugal engines that drive scenes faster and higher.” With small reservations that a market metaphor may get in the way of the fullness of the truth he is describing, I realize, too, that some of these dynamics pertain to many human activities, not merely making; St. Augustine was not wrong when he said that Rome, with its overweening ambition, needed nearby Carthage as a reminder that it wasn’t the only seat of power in the world.

If fertile emulation sometimes frays under strain, it is no small thing that that kairos time of admiration and exchange can yield artworks which outlast their makers and—at their best—transcend them. As was the case with Coleridge and Wordsworth, they “cross-pollinated profundity just before their friendship petered out awkwardly,” something I get at in “A Communion of Pathless Solitudes,” my Los Angeles Review of Books essay on Adam Nicolson’s book The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, the Wordsworths, and Their Year of Marvels, “which chronicles the tumultuous year (1797–98) Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William and Dorothy Wordsworth spent as neighbors and collaborators, friends and rivals on the Somerset Quantocks.

“During this time, they composed aloud, wandering lonely as clouds as they broke through copsewood branches and enjambments, pacing down and then up a narrow gravel walk. There Coleridge found ‘Alph, the sacred river,’ which ‘ran / Through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea,’ while Wordsworth beheld ‘these steep and lofty cliffs, / That on a wild secluded scene impress / Thoughts of more deep seclusion,’ and discovered how lovely it was ‘to walk / Along the public way when, for the night / Deserted in its silence, it assumes / A character of deeper quietness / Than pathless solitudes.’”

Read the whole essay HERE to see how their proximity both stimulated creativity and ended.