Joshua Hren is an artificer and a father, a husband, teacher, 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. He currently serves as Scholar-in-Residence at the St. Irenaeus Institute for Catholic Thought.
Joshua's writing has appeared in such journals as The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Wall Street Journal, First Things and America, Public Discourse and New Polity, The Hedgehog Review and Plough, Commonweal and National Review, The University Bookman and the University of Notre Dame's Church Life Journal, 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's writing has appeared in such journals as The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Wall Street Journal, First Things and America, Public Discourse and New Polity, The Hedgehog Review and Plough, Commonweal and National Review, The University Bookman and the University of Notre Dame's Church Life Journal, 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).
Painting: "The Temptation of St. Anthony," by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
