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The Catholic Writer Today: And Other Essays
Over the past decade Dana Gioia has emerged as a compelling advocate of Christianity’s continuing importance in contemporary culture. His incisive and arresting essays have examined the spiritual dimensions of art and the decisive role faith has played in the lives of artists.
This new volume collects Gioia’s essays on Christianity, literature, and the arts. His influential title essay ignited a national conversation about the role of Catholicism in American literature. Other pieces explore the often-harrowing lives of Christian poets and painters as well as contemplate scripture and modern martyrdom.
This new volume collects Gioia’s essays on Christianity, literature, and the arts. His influential title essay ignited a national conversation about the role of Catholicism in American literature. Other pieces explore the often-harrowing lives of Christian poets and painters as well as contemplate scripture and modern martyrdom.
216 pages, Paperback
First published March 8, 2014
7 people are currently reading
91 people want to read
About the author
Dana Gioia
171 books118 followersDana Gioia is an internationally acclaimed and award-winning poet. Former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Gioia is a native Californian of Italian and Mexican descent. He received a B.A. and a M.B.A. from Stanford University and an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. (Gioia is pronounced JOY-uh.)
Gioia has published four full-length collections of poetry, as well as eight chapbooks. His poetry collection, Interrogations at Noon, won the 2002 American Book Award. An influential critic as well, Gioia's 1991 volume Can Poetry Matter?, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, is credited with helping to revive the role of poetry in American public culture.
Gioia's reviews have appeared in many magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, and The Hudson Review. Gioia has written two opera libretti and is an active translator of poetry from Latin, Italian, and German.
As Chairman of the NEA, Gioia succeeded in garnering enthusiastic bi-partisan support in the United States Congress for the mission of the Arts Endowment, as well as in strengthening the national consensus in favor of public funding for the arts and arts education. (Business Week Magazine referred to him as "The Man Who Saved the NEA.")
Gioia's creation of a series of NEA National Initiatives combined with a wider distribution of direct grants to reach previously underserved communities making the agency truly national in scope. Through programs such as Shakespeare in American Communities, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, NEA Jazz Masters, American Masterpieces, and Poetry Out Loud, the Arts Endowment has successfully reached millions of Americans in all corners of the country.
The Big Read became the largest literary program in the history of the federal government. By the end of 2008, 400 communities had held month-long celebrations of great literature. Because of these successes as well as the continued artistic excellence of the NEA's core grant programs, the Arts Endowment, under Chairman Gioia, reestablished itself as a preeminent federal agency and a leader in the arts and arts education.
Renominated in November 2006 for a second term and once again unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Dana Gioia is the ninth Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Gioia left his position as Chairman on January 22, 2009. In 2011 Gioia became the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California where he teaches each fall semester.
Gioia has been the recipient of ten honorary degrees. He has won numerous awards, including the 2010 Laetare Medal from Notre Dame. He and his wife, Mary, have two sons. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Sonoma County, California
Gioia has published four full-length collections of poetry, as well as eight chapbooks. His poetry collection, Interrogations at Noon, won the 2002 American Book Award. An influential critic as well, Gioia's 1991 volume Can Poetry Matter?, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award, is credited with helping to revive the role of poetry in American public culture.
Gioia's reviews have appeared in many magazines including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Washington Post Book World, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, and The Hudson Review. Gioia has written two opera libretti and is an active translator of poetry from Latin, Italian, and German.
As Chairman of the NEA, Gioia succeeded in garnering enthusiastic bi-partisan support in the United States Congress for the mission of the Arts Endowment, as well as in strengthening the national consensus in favor of public funding for the arts and arts education. (Business Week Magazine referred to him as "The Man Who Saved the NEA.")
Gioia's creation of a series of NEA National Initiatives combined with a wider distribution of direct grants to reach previously underserved communities making the agency truly national in scope. Through programs such as Shakespeare in American Communities, Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience, NEA Jazz Masters, American Masterpieces, and Poetry Out Loud, the Arts Endowment has successfully reached millions of Americans in all corners of the country.
The Big Read became the largest literary program in the history of the federal government. By the end of 2008, 400 communities had held month-long celebrations of great literature. Because of these successes as well as the continued artistic excellence of the NEA's core grant programs, the Arts Endowment, under Chairman Gioia, reestablished itself as a preeminent federal agency and a leader in the arts and arts education.
Renominated in November 2006 for a second term and once again unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate, Dana Gioia is the ninth Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.
Gioia left his position as Chairman on January 22, 2009. In 2011 Gioia became the Judge Widney Professor of Poetry and Public Culture at the University of Southern California where he teaches each fall semester.
Gioia has been the recipient of ten honorary degrees. He has won numerous awards, including the 2010 Laetare Medal from Notre Dame. He and his wife, Mary, have two sons. He divides his time between Los Angeles and Sonoma County, California
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
April 11, 2023
This series of essays makes me want to: read more poetry by Gioia, Hopkins, Elizabeth Jennings, Wilbur, to read more novels by Spark, Greene, Waugh, to discover other catholic novelist I have not read yet, to write more poems, to love more deeply, to suffer well, to know my faith so that it spills into all that I am and do.
January 6, 2022
Why are modern Catholic authors hiding? How do we bring them back into the open? (Buy their books, read their books, duh.)
Modern readers don't want religious writers, but a novel set in modernity from a religious perspective can definitely engage a secular audience. It is called Catholic for a reason...
Our "bad" culture doesn't want to read, let alone be lectured morally, so let's start by mainstreaming the "bad" Catholic authors like Mary Karr and--though she'll never admit to being Catholic--Tricia Lockwood.
Hollywood picking up a Catholic screenplay based on a Catholic novel would help the cause but movies are expensive and usually terrible. I'm just sick of Oscar bait propaganda...
Modern readers don't want religious writers, but a novel set in modernity from a religious perspective can definitely engage a secular audience. It is called Catholic for a reason...
Our "bad" culture doesn't want to read, let alone be lectured morally, so let's start by mainstreaming the "bad" Catholic authors like Mary Karr and--though she'll never admit to being Catholic--Tricia Lockwood.
Hollywood picking up a Catholic screenplay based on a Catholic novel would help the cause but movies are expensive and usually terrible. I'm just sick of Oscar bait propaganda...
March 17, 2017
Such an important work. I hope that every literature and writing student out there is assigned this essay to read and ponder. It would be good reading for our seminarians as well!
February 27, 2020
Just a great read to help one permeate the deep layers of Catholic literary insight.
November 26, 2022
Oh my goodness the structure of this collection is a little bonkers, but I really don't care. I learned so much from the august yet personable Dana Gioia. Thank you wise blood books! This is a treasure. 10/10 recommend.
October 9, 2020
Good attempt at explaining why contemporary literature seems bereft of faithful Catholic writers.
Just as practicing Catholics cannot trust the fake Catholics Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi in the political realm, ordinary Catholics probably would not be able to identify a practicing Catholic author if their lives depended on it. Dana Gioia’s essays and interviews help to explain this literary vacuum.
A major definition occurs early in the book and is essential to understand this dire situation. Gioia classifies “three degrees of literary Catholicism”:
“First, there are the writers who are practicing Catholics and remain active in the Church. Second, there are cultural Catholics, writers who were raised in the faith and often educated in Catholic schools. [….] Finally, there are anti-Catholic Catholics, writers who have broken with the Church but remain obsessed with its failings and injustices, both genuine and imaginary” (21).
Aha! That’s why we ordinary lay people cannot identify artists, poets, and writers who are as proud of their faith as we are. Contemporary “Catholic” authors who are identified as such (at least, those promoted by the anti-Catholic media and the anti-Catholic Democratic Party) are in the third group.
A key term to remember in reading this book is “enumeration”: an enumeration of the three categories of “Catholics” in the United States, a listing of Catholic British authors, a citation of Catholic poets, and even an enumeration of Catholic sacred music composers.
Many of Gioia’s ideas are helpful for ordinary Catholic people who, after they have tweeted and done all they could to advance President Trump’s reelection, just want to sit in a cozy chair with a cup of espresso-grind coffee and read a good book, like Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory or the violent short stories of Flannery O’Connor, who is in danger of being “cancelled (i.e. censored) by Antifa domestic terrorists or racist Black Lives Matter rioters.
For example, Gioia mentions the polarity functioning in Catholic writing versus Protestant writing, especially those saccharine Evangelical Christian novels flooding the reading market. “Catholic literature is rarely pious,” Gioia writes; “Catholic writing tends to be comic, rowdy, rude, and even violent” (20). In contrast, “American Protestant writing has often tried to present good people doing good things” (175). Righteous, yes, but focusing on goody two shoes characters makes for boring reading.
For those interested in the many enumerations Gioia offers, consult these pages: Catholic writers in general (25-6), sacred music composers (126-7), British Catholic novelists (151), and Catholic poets (170).
Except as evidence of how he betrayed his Catholic family, the essay on Donne is irrelevant (44-60).
A repeated motif for all of the Catholic writers whom Gioia identifies and, for some, elaborates in separate essays in the volume could be “still too little known, even by Catholics” (107). Thus, Gioia’s book may serve an eminent good in helping us ordinary Catholic lay people see that our literary influence has not stopped and that there are faithful Catholics writing magnificent works.
All we have to do is read and promote them. For example, I just interlibrary loaned many of Elizabeth Jennings’ poetry books. Her credo “My Roman Catholic religion and my poems are the most important things in my life” struck the proverbial chord in my own life (113).
Similarly, readers of this review should find their own special interest writer and do the same.
Just as practicing Catholics cannot trust the fake Catholics Joe Biden or Nancy Pelosi in the political realm, ordinary Catholics probably would not be able to identify a practicing Catholic author if their lives depended on it. Dana Gioia’s essays and interviews help to explain this literary vacuum.
A major definition occurs early in the book and is essential to understand this dire situation. Gioia classifies “three degrees of literary Catholicism”:
“First, there are the writers who are practicing Catholics and remain active in the Church. Second, there are cultural Catholics, writers who were raised in the faith and often educated in Catholic schools. [….] Finally, there are anti-Catholic Catholics, writers who have broken with the Church but remain obsessed with its failings and injustices, both genuine and imaginary” (21).
Aha! That’s why we ordinary lay people cannot identify artists, poets, and writers who are as proud of their faith as we are. Contemporary “Catholic” authors who are identified as such (at least, those promoted by the anti-Catholic media and the anti-Catholic Democratic Party) are in the third group.
A key term to remember in reading this book is “enumeration”: an enumeration of the three categories of “Catholics” in the United States, a listing of Catholic British authors, a citation of Catholic poets, and even an enumeration of Catholic sacred music composers.
Many of Gioia’s ideas are helpful for ordinary Catholic people who, after they have tweeted and done all they could to advance President Trump’s reelection, just want to sit in a cozy chair with a cup of espresso-grind coffee and read a good book, like Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory or the violent short stories of Flannery O’Connor, who is in danger of being “cancelled (i.e. censored) by Antifa domestic terrorists or racist Black Lives Matter rioters.
For example, Gioia mentions the polarity functioning in Catholic writing versus Protestant writing, especially those saccharine Evangelical Christian novels flooding the reading market. “Catholic literature is rarely pious,” Gioia writes; “Catholic writing tends to be comic, rowdy, rude, and even violent” (20). In contrast, “American Protestant writing has often tried to present good people doing good things” (175). Righteous, yes, but focusing on goody two shoes characters makes for boring reading.
For those interested in the many enumerations Gioia offers, consult these pages: Catholic writers in general (25-6), sacred music composers (126-7), British Catholic novelists (151), and Catholic poets (170).
Except as evidence of how he betrayed his Catholic family, the essay on Donne is irrelevant (44-60).
A repeated motif for all of the Catholic writers whom Gioia identifies and, for some, elaborates in separate essays in the volume could be “still too little known, even by Catholics” (107). Thus, Gioia’s book may serve an eminent good in helping us ordinary Catholic lay people see that our literary influence has not stopped and that there are faithful Catholics writing magnificent works.
All we have to do is read and promote them. For example, I just interlibrary loaned many of Elizabeth Jennings’ poetry books. Her credo “My Roman Catholic religion and my poems are the most important things in my life” struck the proverbial chord in my own life (113).
Similarly, readers of this review should find their own special interest writer and do the same.
December 23, 2023
“The shallow novelty, the low-cost nihilism, and the vague and sentimental spiritual pretensions of so much contemporary art—in every media—is the legacy of [the schism between Christianity and the arts], as well as the cynicism that pervades the art world” (26).
“Art is holistic and incarnate—simultaneously addressing the intellect, emotions, imagination, physical senses, and memory without dividing them” (30).
“If the state of contemporary Catholic literary culture can best be conveyed by the image of a crumbling, old, immigrant neighborhood, then let me suggest that it is time for Catholic writers and intellectuals to leave the homogenous, characterless suburbs of the imagination, and move back to the big city… it is time to renovate and reoccupy our own tradition" (35).
“Art is holistic and incarnate—simultaneously addressing the intellect, emotions, imagination, physical senses, and memory without dividing them” (30).
“If the state of contemporary Catholic literary culture can best be conveyed by the image of a crumbling, old, immigrant neighborhood, then let me suggest that it is time for Catholic writers and intellectuals to leave the homogenous, characterless suburbs of the imagination, and move back to the big city… it is time to renovate and reoccupy our own tradition" (35).
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews