by Joshua Hren

I recall with great lucidity combing through the editorial slush pile of Dappled Things literary magazine and coming across truly well-made, beautiful, truthful stories that seemed to contain inklings of a new idiom in the Catholic literary tradition. When I corresponded with these authors, I came across a familiar refrain: we can’t find a publisher. Many claimed that the faith-charged vision that governed and grew out from the very hearts of their stories set them at a disadvantage against a publishing industry that is immodestly secular. I set about to scouring the neon pages of the world wide web; and just as they said, so it was. When conversations surrounding this problem of secularization, and of the seeming decline of “Catholic” (and more broadly Christian!) fiction emerged in the pages of The New York Times, or in The Wall Street Journal, some began to contend that secularism is a myth. Others openly wondered whether Catholic writers who failed to get their “great” novels published weren’t merely nursing the wounds of their bad artistry in the comforting arms of the Mother of God—blaming their failure to write good fiction on the big bad wolf of secularism at the door of the Cathedral. The argument continues, Deo Gratias. In Whose Justice, Which Rationality? MacIntyre offers a definition of tradition that may help us to characterize the debate concerning Catholic letters. Tradition is:
an argument extended through time in which certain fundamental agreements are defined and refined in terms of two kinds of conflict: those with critics and enemies external to the tradition who reject all or at least key parts of those fundamental agreements, and those internal interpretive debates through which the meaning and rationale of the fundamental agreements came to be expressed and by whose progress a tradition is constituted.
But it is not my intention, here, to contribute a rational argument to the debate concerning faith and fiction, Catholic vision and narrative art. I’m grateful to Gregory Wolfe and Paul Elie and Dana Gioia, among others, who have given that debate visibility and intelligibility. What I have contributed, over the past four years, is one literary vessel through which the question of contemporary Catholic letters is being worked out in the form of living literature held out to be read and reckoned with. What “I” have contributed. No. What we have contributed. From novels such as The Oracles Fell Silent by Lee Oser, or Bearings and Distances by Glenn Arbery to Collected poems of Helen Pinkerton or James Matthew Wilson’s Some Permanent Things or The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking. From Annabelle Moseley’s A Ship to Hold the World and The Marionette’s Ascent to Kaye Park Hinckley’s short story collection Birds of a Feather to Karen Ullo’s vampire novel Jennifer the Damned. And there is Dana Gioia’s The Catholic Writer Today, which has become a sort of constitutional document for our press. The last lines of it read thus:
If the state of contemporary Catholic literary culture can best be conveyed by the image of a crumbling, old immigrant neighborhood, then let me suggest that it is time for Catholic writers and intellectuals to leave the homogenous, characterless suburbs of the imagination and move back to the big city—where we can renovate these remarkable districts that have such grace and personality, such strength and tradition. It is time to renovate and reoccupy our own tradition. Starting the renovation may seem like a daunting task. But as soon as one place is rebuilt, someone else will already be at work next door, and gradually the whole city begins to reshape itself around you. Renovation is hard work, but what a small price to pay to have the right home.