People keep asking me (Jessica Hooten Wilson) if the “Catholic Imagination” refers to anything other than literary arts. Yes, though the biennial conference has always made the belles lettres central to the event, with a taste of other arts, including film, theater, and this year, jazz. We will have a show-and-tell of sacred architecture, as I mentioned in the previous newsletter, but it is the fiction, poetry, and prose we are amplifying with the 2022 event. If you want to read ahead and be well versed in the conversation, I have already suggested Dana Gioia’s “The Catholic Writer Today,” but let me also suggest two other brief reads: “The Situation of the Catholic Novelist” by Trevor Cribben Merrill (who will be presenting on Girard and sharing from his novel Minor Indignities, both published by WiseBlood Books) and Contemplative Realism by Joshua Hren, founder of WiseBlood Books). After you read the latter, you can sign the manifesto in support of it!
For longer reads, here’s a handful off my shelf, most notably Andrew Greely and David Tracy. I probably should have also pulled down the Jesus the Imagination series from Angelico Press or any issue of Evangelization and Culture, which impresses upon readers the love of beauty and the primacy of the imagination. The editor of E&C, Tod Worner, will be presenting on a panel, as well as at a luncheon with Jared Zimmerer, sharing how Word on Fire sees their work as promoting the Catholic Imagination.
I have shared so much about the living novelists and poets steeped in the Catholic imagination, but we also will have living critics who are following in the footsteps of Greely, Tracy, William Lynch and others in explicating what the Catholic imagination looks like in past writers.
Recent convert Tsh Oxenreider will be speaking about Walker Percy, Shemaiah Gozalez who is writing a biography on the late novelist Brian Doyle, Mark Bosco on Graham Greene, Greg Wolfe on Cormac McCarthy, Zimmerer on Russell Kirk and Kathleen Marks on the great Toni Morrison. I am grateful that these literary critics keep the dialogue going about what is particularly Catholic about certain novels, poems, plays, and prose.
If you are looking to read more about the Catholic imagination, subscribe to this newsletter and follow our updates on our website as we post books there. We’d love for you to share titles with us that should be included. And do join us in Dallas, Sept 30-Oct 1!