Joshua Hren is a father and artificer, husband and critic. He is founder and editor of Wiseblood Books and co-founder of the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at the University of St. Thomas, Houston, and was co-founder of the Great Books Honors College at Belmont Abbey. Joshua regularly publishes essays and poems in such journals as The Los Angeles Review of Books and First Things, America and Public Discourse, New Polity and The Hedgehog Review, Plough and Commonweal, National Review and The University Bookman, and Religion and Literature and LOGOS.
Joshua is the author of ten books: the short story collections This Our Exile and In the Wine Press; a book of poems called Last Things, First Things, & Other Lost Causes; Middle-earth and the Return of the Common Good: J.R.R. Tolkien and Political Philosophy; How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic; the novels Infinite Regress and Blue Walls Falling Down; and the theological-aesthetical manifesto Contemplative Realism. Joshua's More than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature is forthcoming from Word on Fire (2026) and Faith in the Furnace of Doubt: Dana Gioia's Visionary Poetics is forthcoming from Catholic University of America Press (2025).
Joshua is the author of ten books: the short story collections This Our Exile and In the Wine Press; a book of poems called Last Things, First Things, & Other Lost Causes; Middle-earth and the Return of the Common Good: J.R.R. Tolkien and Political Philosophy; How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic; the novels Infinite Regress and Blue Walls Falling Down; and the theological-aesthetical manifesto Contemplative Realism. Joshua's More than a Matter of Taste: The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature is forthcoming from Word on Fire (2026) and Faith in the Furnace of Doubt: Dana Gioia's Visionary Poetics is forthcoming from Catholic University of America Press (2025).
Painting: "The Temptation of St. Anthony," by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
