How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic

by Joshua Hren

Overview

“Only a Christian, nay a mystic, because he has some idea of what there is in man, can be a complete novelist.”
—Jacques Maritain

Literature . . . is the science or history partly and at best of the natural man, partly of man in rebellion. It is a contradiction in terms to attempt a sinless Literature of sinful man.
—Saint John Henry Newman

All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it.
—Flannery O’Connor



How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic is a sweeping survey of some of the finest literary works ever written by our fallen and yet redeemed race. Joshua Hren takes readers on a tour that spans centuries and explores our broken path to salvation, passing through stories known to many but perhaps understood by few, and others that merit a broader readership.
With appeals to staples of the Catholic literary tradition such as Flannery O’Connor and Evelyn Waugh, to the often-sidelined works of Léon Bloy, Caroline Gordon, and Christopher Beha, to the masterpieces of even those who were distanced from the Church—Flaubert and James Joyce and Chekhov; Hemingway and David Foster Wallace and George Saunders—Hren sheds light on stories that grapple with matters essential to Catholics.
His intrinsically Catholic approach to the study of literature examines the presence of conversion in great literary texts, and considers the way in which writers dramatize the workings of grace upon nature. His analysis also bears a sacramental vision, articulating the ways in which seen images point to unseen realities. How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic searches out the persistence of Catholic ideas, images, and concerns in purportedly secular and postmodern stories. It is a love letter to the Christic imagination which incarnates human nature as having its final end not in the characters’ self-actualization, but in their salvation, giving readers of this work a deeper understanding of how the power of story can lead them closer to Christ.
Includes a section for aspiring writers devoted to the techniques and devices that make good fiction, as well as a list of must-read literary works by which all Catholics can be enriched.

 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781505118667
Publisher:	TAN Books
Publication date:	05/04/2021
Pages:	480
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Joshua Hren is founder of Wiseblood Books and co-founder of the Honors College at Belmont Abbey where he teaches and writes at the intersection of Christianity and culture. He has published essays and poems in such journals as First Things, America, and LOGOS. His books include the short story collections This Our Exile and In the Wine Press, as well as Middle-earth and the Return of the Common Good: Tolkien and Political Philosophy. Joshua’s first novel is forthcoming.
 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements xiii

Introduction 1

Part I Reading (and Writing) Like a Catholic

Chapter 1 Between a Record of Man in Rebellion and the Beatific Vision: Conversion in Catholic Literature 13

Chapter 2 Beauty Will Not Save the World but the Literature You Save May Be Your Own 45

Chapter 3 The Ends of the Novel 61

Chapter 4 Whispers and Shouts of Faith in Fiction: Léon Bloy and the Catholic Writer Today 71

Part II Reading Christ-Haunted Fictions

Chapter 5 A Dank, Dimly-Lighted Place: Hemingway on Affliction, Beauty, and Being at Home in the World 97

Chapter 6 Christ-Haunted George Saunders 103

Chapter 7 Jack Kerouac's Beatific Visions 117

Chapter 8 Peace in a Plastic World: Evelyn Waugh's Nativity 123

Chapter 9 Thank You for the Light, F. Scott Fitzgerald 129

Chapter 10 The Pallor of Our Plagues: Katherine Anne Porter's Pale Horse, Pale Rider 133

Chapter 11 Marriage Prospects with David Foster Wallace 139

Chapter 12 Portrait of a Paralyzed Priesthood: James Joyce's "The Sisters" 149

Chapter 13 For Whom Chekhov's Bell Tolls 157

Chapter 14 Flaubert's Fictional Faith 163

Part III Reading Human Nature

Chapter 15 Acolyte of Ambition: Balzac's Lost Illusions and Lost Souls 177

Chapter 16 Reading the Riddle of Human Nature, from Homer to Dostoevsky 191

Part IV Reading Catholic Fictions

Chapter 17 The Problem of Pity: Misguided Mercy & Dante's Infernal Purgation 227

Chapter 18 What Waugh Saw in America: An Anglo-American Romance 241

Chapter 19 The Sound and the Fury, Symbolizing Something: Walker Percy and Jacques Maritain on the Paradoxical Miracle at the Limits of Language 259

Chapter 20 Stay in Your Lane or You'll Get into 'The Trouble'": J. F. Powers and the First Commandment of Fiction 283

Chapter 21 Caroline Gordon Lost and Found: The Malefactors 291

Chapter 22 Mistakes Were Made: The Apocalypse of Truth in A Canticle for Leibowitz 313

Chapter 23 Christopher Beha's Capacity for God: What Happened to Sophie Wilder Revisited 319

Chapter 24 What the Catholic Novel Might Become: Randy Boyagoda's Original Prin 327

Part V How to Write (Like a Catholic)

Chapter 25 Introduction 341

Chapter 26 The Trouble with Technique and the Artistic Habit 345

Chapter 27 Most Grievous Faults and Fictional Reparations 349

Chapter 28 The Problem of Proper Proportion 359

Chapter 29 Dialogue, Dead or Alive 365

Chapter 30 The Heresy of Formlessness and Old Faithful Unity 381

Chapter 31 A Handful of Dust (Drop the Rest on the Floor), and a Half-Sketched Story with an Essay Woven Through it 383

Chapter 32 The Duties of Details 387

Chapter 33 Don't Make a Scene: Consciousness and Three Sensuous Strokes 393

Chapter 34 Central Intelligence and Peripheral Points of View 415

Chapter 35 Complication and Resolution: Tragic, Eucatastrophic, Comic 429

Chapter 36 Only a Mystic Can Be a Complete Novelist 447

Appendix A 101 Books to Read Like a Catholic 451

Appendix B Reading and Writing Like a Catholic: Further Forays 457

Editorial Reviews

Joshua Hren’s How to Read (and Write) Like A Catholic pays tribute to a wide range of notable authors from the Catholic literary tradition. But what follows Hren’s exquisite and original exploration of literary texts is a quiet challenge: a Catholic writer whose work finds deep relevance in our age will be one who shrugs off easy platitudes and instead pursues an unflinching moral, intellectual, and artistic engagement.”
 
—Christine Flanagan, author/editor The Letters of Flannery O’Connor and Caroline Gordon
 

“Joshua Hren shows us how to read well by delving deeply into the well of living meaning to be found in great literature. Learning to read (and write) like a Catholic is to leave the shallows to swim in the depths and to step out of the shadows into the light. It is life changing.”
 
—Joseph Pearce, author of Catholic Literary Giants: A Field Guide to the Catholic Literary Landscape, and many more

 

Joshua Hren’s How to Read (and Write) like a Catholic is not just another thick, square book. It
is a catechism that will guide you through the long Catholic literary tradition, stopping along the
way to introduce you to its best authors and to examine the great questions of judgment and craft
that every reader and every writer must consider. This is not just a new book by an important
young author; it is the fruit of an entire tradition. It is no mere survey; it is an introduction to a
way of living well within the human drama of Christianity.
-James Matthew Wilson, Poet-in-Residence, Benedict XVI Institute for Sacred Music and Divine
Liturgy

Catholic literature is, for many people today, at best a minor genre, at worst an impossibility, since they think religious commitment stunts the imagination. In this wide-ranging survey, Joshua Hren shows how very wrong those prejudices are by an examination of some of the great Catholic writers of the past. In addition, while there are no sure rules for creating literature that deeply engages faith, he offers some valuable insights into how writers can further the Catholic literary tradition in their own work, even in our unfavorable circumstances.

—Robert Royal, president of the Faith and Reason Institute and author of Dante Alighieri: Divine Comedy, Divine Spirituality and A Deeper Vision: The Catholic Intellectual Tradition in the Twentieth Century.
 

From the Publisher