Testing the Spirits: Finding Faith in Contemporary Fiction
& Realismo Contemplativo: Un Manifiesto Estético Teológico
+AMDG+
This has been a banner week!
First, I received this amazing endorsement for Faith in the Furnace of Doubt: Dana Gioia’s Visionary Poetics, forthcoming from CUA Press in December-January:
“What an extraordinary experience to enter Joshua Hren’s Faith in the Furnace of Doubt as he reveals what the Catholic poet Dana Gioia has offered us over a lifetime of writing some of the finest, sharpest, and at times haunting pieces in contemporary American literature and the role of the committed Catholic poet. No wonder that Hren, himself a gifted Catholic writer, undertakes to reveal this Dantesque underworld in a way few others would dare to follow without acknowledging God’s grace. Along that road Hren invokes Seneca, Virgil, Augustine, Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, Shakespeare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Robert Lowell, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, to name a few. Reading and pondering these pages has been a haunting, necessary experience like few others, and I am grateful to see the well-earned flickering light as I exit the refining fires of that tunnel.”
-Paul Mariani, Boston College, author of Lost Puritan: A Life of Robert Lowell, and many others
Then, Bishop Daniel Flores agreed to read the new Spanish translation of my book Contemplative Realism: A Theological-Aesthetical Manifesto with an eye towards writing an endorsement for the book.
And finally, I signed a contract with Catholic University of America Press for my eleventh book, Testing the Spirits: Finding Faith in Contemporary Fiction, due out in 2027:
P.S. This past Monday, before dawn, I made a pilgrimage to Holy Hill, a local basilica and Carmelite monastery. There I went to confession and early Mass and venerated the relics of St. Thérèse of Lisieux. I of course cannot offer a certified proof that she is behind the graces of this banner week, but I would be a fool not to suspect that my friend is letting fall rose petals from paradise.
Wonderful news all! Judging by those chapters titles this will be an excellent new book.
Tangentially, in one of the strange workings of grace, I venerated St. Therese's relics in South Africa once when I was studying abroad and she was traveling the country. I had no idea she was at Holy Hill - was that just a brief stop? In another interesting occurrence, I've ended up with a relic of her (I think first class) in my living room. All to say I've grown to feel a strong relationship with her and am very glad of your success and her intercession this week!
congratulations! I prayed a Te Deum for you awhile ago after reading the post bout this on X/ Twitter.