Joshua M Hren

B.A., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2005
M.A., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2009
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, 2012

• Honors College
• Dante’s Divine Comedy
• Homer and Vergil
• Augustine and Aquinas
• Dostoevsky
• Art and the Beautiful
• Art of Fiction

Publications:

• How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic (TAN Books, forthcoming April 2021)
• Infinite Regress: A Novel (forthcoming through Angelico Press, 2022)
• Fugitive Catholicity: Dana Gioia and Poetry that Matters (book under consideration)
• Litanies for the Lost: Poems (book under consideration)
• In the Wine Press: Short Stories (Angelico Press, May 2020)
• 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
• Review Essay “George Saunders on Story” in First Things, Winter 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,” forthcoming in National Review, 2021
• Poem “How to Shoulder What Remains,” forthcoming in National Review
• Poem “But From the Beginning it Was Not So,” commissioned by Bishop Robert Barron’s Evangelization & Culture journal, Fall 2020
• Essay “Marriage Prospects with David Foster Wallace,” in Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal
• Essay “‘Mistakes Were Made’: The Apocalypse of Truth in A Canticle for Leibowitz,” forthcoming in New Oxford Review
• Essay “Caroline Gordon Lost and Found: The Malefactors,” forthcoming in America
• Essay “Portrait of a Paralyzed Priesthood: James Joyce’s ‘The Sisters,’” forthcoming in Dappled Things
• 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 “The Pallor of our Plagues: Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider” in Crisis, April 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
• 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
• Article “Climbing to God on ‘The Burning Ladder’: Dana Gioia’s Via Negativa,”in Religion and the Arts, March 2019
• Poem “The Nuclear Winter,” in Commonweal
• Short Story “Their Fire is Not Quenched,” in Windhover
• 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
• Short Story “Up and Down and Up Again” in Windhover, Spring 2019
• “The Problem of Pity: Misguided Mercy and Dante’s Infernal Purgation,” in Touchstone, March 2019
• Essay “Whispers and Shouts of Faith in Fiction: Léon Bloy and the Catholic Writer Today,” in Dappled Things, Winter 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.
• 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
• 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
• Article “Tolkien and the Technocratic Paradigm” in New Blackfriars, July 2016
• Entries on “René Girard,” “J.F. Powers,” and “Nathan W. Scott” in Encyclopedia of  Christianity in the United States, forthcoming 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
• “A Bird’s Nest of Being: A Conversation with Brian Jobe, Author of Bird’s Nest in Your Hair”   in Dappled Things, Summer 2013
• “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

Awards:

• Adrian Faculty Excellence Award (2019-2020)