Is there a Catholic presence in American literature today?
I find today that there are many books with a distinctively Catholic aspect, but that there are few (or no) exemplary lives akin to those of the four figures I wrote about. William J. Kennedy’s Ironweed, for example, is a powerful novel, one that is Catholic to the bone, but Kennedy’s work as a whole is not religiously preoccupied. Rob Hansen’s Mariette in Ecstasy sits alongside books he wrote about Jesse James and Nebraska… Why is this? I’m not sure. How do you see the Church faring in the near future in the spheres of literature and of the arts? Is another renaissance on the horizon? My sense is that that is too general a way to approach the question, whether you are a Catholic literary critic (and we need one of those) or a Catholic artist. It’s not right for us to fret about whether we are having a “significant impact.” It’s for us to ask ourselves whether our writing is worthy of our callings and the religious faith in which the call is heard. The rest, as T.S. Eliot wrote, is not
