RECENT ESSAYS  AND REVIEWS

• "The Ghosts of James Joyce in the Fiction of Edward P. Jones'” in America
  
• "I Want to Make You See" (On Dostoevsky's Idiot's Spiritual Tutorial),  in Plough
  
• "The Moral Imagination and the Spirit of Literature," in Public Discourse
• Review of Annihilation: A Novel, by Michel Houellebecq, in First Things
• Review of Jane Austen and the Price of Happiness, by Inger Brodey, in The Hedgehog Review
  
• "Proust's Sacramental Sacrifice," in LOGOS.
• "Testing the Spirits of Jon Fosse's The Shining," in First Things
• "Taking the Persecutor's Side," on Proust's The Swann Way
• The Marriage of Ancient and Modern Tragedy: Joseph Conrad’s Doubled Vision
  A Review of The Discerning Narrator: Conrad, Aristotle, and Modernity
  by Alexia Hannis, forthcoming
• "More than a Mortal God": A Review of Vinson Cunningham's Great Expectations, in Current
• Review of Jason M. Baxter's Translation of The Divine Comedy: Inferno in CWR:  "Saving Dante from the Classicists."
• "Fail Better, James Joyce," a Review of James Joyce: A Life, Gabrielle Carey, in America
• "The Dumb Ox the Good Samaritan: A Double Review of: James Joyce and Samaritan Hospitality: Postcritical and Postsecular Reading in Dubliners and Ulysses, by Richard Rankin Russell & Joyce, Aristotle, and Aquinas, by Fran O’Rourke, in Literary Matters
• Review of Why Do the Heathen Rage?: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at a Work in Progress, by Flannery O'Connor
• "The Afterlife of Coetzee's Secular Commedia," in Notre Dame's Church Life Journal
• "In Search of Ordinary Time," in Genealogies of Modernity
• "Flaubert's Anti-Sentimental Sex": Review essay on Raymond MacKenzie's translation of Sentimental Education (2024) & The Letters of Gustave Flaubert (NYRB), in The Hedgehog Review
• "Eugene Vodolazkin's Angel of History: A Review of A History of the Island," in Notre Dame's Church Life Journal
• "The Novel is Dead. Long Live the Novel!: A Review of The Novel, Who Needs It? by Joseph Epstein," in New Polity
• "Hölderlin’s Successful Failure: A Review of Hölderlin’s Madness: Chronicle of a Dwelling Life, 1806-1843, by Giorgio Agamben," forthcoming
• "Every Mann: A Review of New and Selected Stories, Thomas Mann, translated by Damion Searls," in The University Bookman
• "Man Laughs, God Weeps: On Milan Kundera and the Spirit of the Novel," in The European Conservative
• "Cormac McCarthy's De Profundis: A Double Review of The Passenger and Stella Maris," in The Englewood Review of Books
• "A Cartography of Redemption": Review of Heimito von Doderer's The Strudlhof Steps, in The Los Angeles Review of Books
• “Prisoner of War in the Machine Paradise: Review of Bernanos: His Political Thought and Prophecy, by Thomas Molnar,” in New Polity
• "The Suffering Cure: On Georges Bernanos' The Diary of a Country Priest," in Word on Fire's Magazine.
• "A Communion of Pathless Solitudes: Review of The Making of Poetry: Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Their Year of Marvels, by Adam Nicholson," in The Los Angeles Review of Books
• "David Foster Wallace's Denomination of Joy": Review of Something to Do With Paying Attention, in America
• “Radical Sympathies: Review of Fathers and Children, by Ivan Turgenev,” in The European Conservative
• "All That's Left is This Foundation Stone," Review of The Commonwealth: Poems by Dan Rattelle, in The University Bookman
• "Henry James and the Secular Pilgrim," in The European Conservative
• "Toni Morrison's Many-Colored Lamb: Review of Recitatif," in The Englewood Review of Books
• "Divine Ironies"
• "Saunders on Story": Review of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders in First Things
• "What Waugh Saw in America," in America
• "On the Use and the Abuse of the American Martyrs"
• Review essay on Jonathan Franzen's new novel Crossroads in Law & Liberty
• "The Silence of the Poets: Dana Gioia and the Transcendence of Verse," in Word on Fire's Magazine
• "God, if there was a God": Review of Phil Klay's novel Missionaries in University Bookman
• "Finding Dante in the Infernal Midwest": Review of Randy Boyagoda's Dante's Indiana in Law & Liberty
• Review of Steven Faulkner's The Image: A Novel in Pieces
• "Irony that Gives a Damn" in Public Discourse
• "More than a Matter of Taste" in The Hedgehog Review
• "Christopher Beha's Capacity for God" in University Bookman
• "Cracks of Faith in the Secular Self": Review of Christopher Beha's novel The Index of Self-Destructive Acts
• Review of Dana Gioia's Studying with Miss Bishop: Memoirs from a Young Writer's Life
• "Kerouac's Beatific Visions," First Things
• "The First Commandment of Fiction," First Things
• "Christ-Haunted George Saunders," First Things
• "An Ancient Descent into a Modern Hell: Dana Gioia's 'The Underworld' Under the Influence," in FORMA
• "Mystery That is the World’s Least Hidden Thing," Review of
• The Harvest and the Lamp, by Andrew Frisardi, in Presence
• "Death Comes for Ross Douthat: Review of The Deep Places: A Memoir of Illness and Discovery," in The Lamp
• "The Catholic Writer of the Future," Review of Many-Colored Fleece: An Anthology of Twentieth Century Fiction by Sister Mariella Gable, O.S.B., in Dappled Things
• "The Genius of the Christian Janus": A Review of  Memoirs from Beyond the Grave: 1800-1815, by François-René de Chateaubriand," in The European Conservative

---

CV

joshua_hren_phd_cv_2025_.pdf
File Size:	286 kb
File Type:	pdf

Download File

---

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS

• Infinite Regress: A Novel (February 2022)
• Contemplative Realism: A Theological-Aesthetical Manifesto (BXVI Institute, February 2022)
• How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic (TAN Books, May 2021)
• Last Things, First Things, & Other Lost Causes, poetry chapbook, forthcoming through Little Gidding Press
• Fugitive Faith: Dana Gioia and Poetry that Matters (under consideration)
• In the Wine Press: Short Stories (Angelico Press, May 2020), First Place in the Catholic Media Association 2020 Book Award (Anthologies)
• Middle-earth and the Return of the Common Good: J.R.R. Tolkien and Political Philosophy, (Cascade Books, 2018)
• This Our Exile: Short Stories (Angelico Press, 2018),  Honorable Mention in the 2018 Christianity and Literature Book of the Year Award
• ​"Men Becoming Gods in “Style”: Gioia and Girard on Divinized Desire," forthcoming in Contagion: A Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture
• Commissioned Review of Jonathan Franzen’s Crossroads: A Novel, in Law & Liberty, November 2021
• Commissioned Review Essay “Finding Dante in the Infernal Midwest: Randy Boyagoda’s Dante’s Indiana,” in Law & Liberty, Fall 2021
• Commissioned Essay “The Silence of the Poets: Dana Gioia and the Transcendence of Verse,” in the Word on Fire Institute’s Evangelization & Culture, Fall 2021
• Commissioned Essay “Living on the Fat of the Faith: On Founding an MFA at the University of St. Thomas” in Christianity & Literature, Fall 2021
• “Civilize the Sacrifice,” poem, forthcoming in Commonweal
• Review Essay “‘God, if there was a God’ in Phil Klay’s Missionaries,” in The University Bookman, Summer 2021
• Review Essay “The Stones Cry Out: The Image: A Novel in Pieces, by Steven Faulkner,” in National Catholic Register
• “Cosmic Scope and Expansive Vision: Interview with Joshua Hren and James Matthew Wilson: Founders of the New Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing,” forthcoming in Dappled Things
• Commissioned Review of Andrew Frisardi’s The Harvest and the Lamp: Poems in Presence
• Essay “Irony that Gives a Damn” in Public Discourse, June 2021
• Essay “More than a Matter of Taste: Hildebrand & Henry James” in The Hedgehog Review, June 2021
• Essay “Marriage Prospects with David Foster Wallace,” forthcoming in Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal, Summer 2021
• Review Essay “George Saunders on Story” in First Things, Winter 2021
• Essay “Caroline Gordon Lost and Found: The Malefactors,” America Magazine, Spring 2021
• Review Essay “Acolyte of Ambition: Balzac’s Lost Illusions and Lost Souls,” in Law and Liberty, Winter 2021
• Essay “Mistakes Were Made: Apocalypse of Truth in A Canticle for Leibowitz,” in Catholic World Report, Winter 2021
• Essay “For Whom Chekhov’s Bell Tolls” in Catholic World Report, Winter 2020
• Essay “Christopher Beha’s Capacity for God: What Happened to Sophie Wilder Revisited” in The University Bookman, Winter 2020
• Poem “How to Shoulder What Remains,” in National Review, 2022
• "Franzen's Blunted Edge of Belief" 
• Poem “But From the Beginning it Was Not So,” commissioned by Evangelization & Culture journal, Fall 2020
  
• Essay “‘Mistakes Were Made’: The Apocalypse of Truth in A Canticle for Leibowitz,” forthcoming in New Oxford Review
• Essay “Portrait of a Paralyzed Priesthood: James Joyce’s ‘The Sisters,’” forthcoming in Dappled Things
• Review Essay “Christopher Beha’s Capacity for God: Sophie Wilder Revisited,” in The University Bookman, November 2020
• Review Essay “Cracks of Faith in the Secular Self: Christopher Beha’s The Index of Self-Destructive Acts,” in Catholic World Report, October 2020
• Essay “The Artifice of Race and the Art of Grace,” on Flannery O’Connor, in Dappled Things, Fall 2020
• Essay “The Wounded Surgeon: Dana Gioia’s ‘Special Treatments Ward,’” in Catholic Arts Today, June 2020
• Essay “What Waugh Saw in America: An Anglo-American Romance,” in America magazine, April 2020
• “Saint Thinkery University for Unlimited Personalized Execution, or, STUUPE©” in Front Porch Republic, May 2020
• Essay “Hemingway’s Crucifying Weakness” in First Things, February 2020
• Essay “The Ends of the Novel,” in Dappled Things, Spring 2020
• Essay “Kerouac’s Beatific Visions” in First Things, January 2020
• Essay “Peace in a Plastic World” in First Things, December 2019
• Essay “What the Catholic Novel Could Become: Randy Boyagoda’s Original Prin,” in The University Bookman, December 2019
• Essay “Kissing the Crucified: Catholic Charity for the Capitally Punished,” in America, January 2020
• Essay “Having and Halving the Truth: John Henry Newman on Liberalism and its Liberally-Educated Discontents,” New Oxford Review, 2020
• Essay “Thank you for the Light, F. Scott Fitzgerald,” in First Things, Fall 2020
• Short Story “Horseradish” in Clarion Magazine, Fall 2019, Nominated for Pushcart Prize
• Short Story “Their Fire is Not Quenched,” in Windhover, September 2019
• Poem “The Nuclear Winter” in Commonweal, June 2019
• Article “Climbing to God on ‘The Burning Ladder’: Dana Gioia’s Via Negativa,”in Religion and the Arts, March 2019
• Short Story “Tears in Things,” in Dappled Things
• Essay “‘Faith’s Ardor in an Air-Conditioned Tomb: Dana Gioia’s Sights of the Unseen in a Secular Age” in Presence: A Journal of Catholic Poetry, 2019
• Essay “Christ-Haunted George Saunders” in First Things, Spring 2019
• Short Story “Up and Down and Up Again” in Windhover, Spring 2019
• Essay “A Fires-Stained Cathedral Gargoyle: Léon Bloy and the Catholic Literary Tradition,” in Dappled Things, Winter 2018, Won Second Place in the Jacques Maritain Prize for Non-Fiction
• “The Problem of Pity: Misguided Mercy and Dante’s Infernal Purgation,” in Touchstone, March 2019
• Poem “The Banality of Evil,” in First Things, Fall 2018
• “Beauty Will Not Save the World But the Literature You Save May Be Your Own: Catholic Literature,  Dead or Alive?” in America
• Essay “Feasts of Doubt or Feasts of Faith?: Dana Gioia’s ‘All Souls’’ and ‘Pentecost,’” Feature in Dappled Things, Fall 2018.
• Review “Under Cosmopolitanism and Outside: Daniel Rattelle’s The Sleeping House, in Dappled Things
• Review of Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion, by Abigail Favale
• Short Story “The Terrible Speed of Mercy,” in Wisconsin’s Emerging Writers: An Anthology of Fiction, Fall 2018
• Short Story “Master and Slave” in Windhover, Fall 2018
• Poem “The Lesser Angels of Our Nature,” in First Things, June 2018
• Article “The Apocalypse of Beatitude: Modern Gnosticism and Misplaced Faith in Dostoevsky’s The Possessed” in Voegelin View, March 2018
• “A Dank, Dimly-Lighted Place: Affliction, Beauty, and Being at Home in the World,” in Dappled Things, Spring 2018
• Poem “In Secular Saeculorum,” in First Things, February 2018
• Short Story “In a Better Place,” Windhover, Spring 2018
• Essay “Tailor-Made for Sin: Hiding Guilt with Garments of Legal Fictions,” Feature in Touchstone, Winter 2018
• Article "Acquisitive Imitation and the Gift Economy: Escaping Reciprocity in J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit," in Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture, Fall 2017
• “After Rhetoric and the Restoration of Persuasion,” in Crisis, Fall of 2017
• Short Story “Gates of Eden” in Windhover, Fall 2017
• Interview with Catholic World Report regarding Wiseblood Books, Summer of 2017
• Poem “Sanguine” in First Things, Summer of 2017
• Short Story “Pawned” in Cobalt Literary Magazine, Summer of 2017
• Poem “Meditation on Modern Mathematics and the Music of Spheres,” in Presence, April 2017
• Short Story “The Man Watching,” in Windhover, Spring 2017
• Short Story “Sick at the Thought” & Short Story Finalist “Inferno” in Adelaide, Spring 2017
• Chapter, “Between the Beatific Vision and a Vision of Man in Rebellion: Catholic Literature Revisited,”   in Renewal of Catholic Higher Education: Essays on Catholic Studies in Honor of Don J. Briel, Fall 2019     
• Article “Tolkien and the Technocratic Paradigm” in New Blackfriars, July 2017
• Entries on “René Girard,” “J.F. Powers,” and “Nathan W. Scott” in Encyclopedia of  Christianity in the United States, November 2016
• Poem “Gehenna” in First Things, June 2016
• Short story “Copper” in Ink & Letters, Winter 2016
• Short story “Heavyweight” in Aethlon Literary Journal, Winter 2015-16 edition
• Review of Witt and Richards' The Hobbit Party: The Vision of Freedom that Tolkien Got and the West Forgot in Gilbert Magazine, Summer 2015
• Article "The Genealogy of Ressentiment and the Achilles' Heel of Humanitarianism: Love of Mankind from the Iliad to The Idiot," in Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, 2014
• “The Sound and the Fury, Symbolizing Something: The Paradoxical Miracle at the Limits of Language:  Maritain, Percy, and The Moviegoer,” book chapter in Redeeming Philosophy: From Metaphysics to Aesthetics, 2014
• “Our Essential Displacement and the Reparation of Fiction:  Interview with Joseph O'Brien,” in Dappled Things, Spring 2013
• Chapter III of novel In the Wine Press in Dappled Things, Winter 2013
• “A Fire-Stained and Blackened Cathedral: An Interview With Joshua Hren” in Dappled Things, Fall 2012
• Article “Truth and Lies in a Chestertonian Sense: Father brown and the Fault of the Depraved Saint” in  Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture, Winter 2012-13
• Selection of my translation of Leon Bloy's La Femme Pauvre published in Dappled Things, Fall 2012
• Short story “Control” in the 6.1 issue of Relief, A Christian Quarterly Expression, Summer 2013
• Short story “Wrecking Ball” as “Editor’s Choice” in 5.2 edition of Relief, January 2012
• Poem “Proof of the Immortality of the Soul with Reference to Beeswax Soap” Dappled Things, Fall 2011
• Chapter II of novel In the Wine Press in Dappled Things, Fall 2011
• Story “Wrecking Ball” received honorable mention in Glimmer Train’s 2010 Short Story Award
• Chapter I of novel In the Wine Press in Dappled Things, Fall 2010
• Poem “A Story in Ashes” in Dappled Things, Summer 2010
• Stories “She Scarce Is” & “Everything Must Go” Top-25 in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open, 2009-2010
• Poem “itinerant intimacies” in Dappled Things, Fall 2009

A FEW POEMS

• "The Lesser Angels of Our Nature," First Things
• "In Secular Saeculorum," First Things
• "Sanguine," First Things
• "But From the Beginning it Was Not So," Evangelization & Culture
• "The Banality of Evil," First Things
• "The Nuclear Winter," Commonweal
• "Civilize the Sacrifice," Commonweal
• "A Story in Ashes," Dappled Things
• "My Burden Light," Catholic Arts Today
• "How to Shoulder What Remains," National Review
• "Agnus Dei" in The Catholic Thing
• "After You Went and Died," in Ekstasis Magazine