In the words of Belmont Abbey College’s Dean of the Honors College, Dr. Joseph Wysocki:
Dr. Joshua Hren will be joining the faculty of a Catholic MFA program at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, TX. While this departure is a deep loss for Belmont Abbey College, Dr. Hren’s new position is a perfect fit for his unique talents and we are glad to know that he will be going on to a position where he can continue to help build up the Kingdom of God through his mentoring and teaching of students. Belmont Abbey College needs Dr. Hren but perhaps the Catholic Literary Revival needs him more.
Over the past four years Dr. Hren has been indispensable in the creation, growth, and day-to-day work of the Honors College. We are eternally grateful for his help and we are not exaggerating when we say that the goods our students have received and continue to receive in the Honors College would be impossible without him. The importance of his contributions over the past few years, recall this paraphrase of a quote from Abraham Lincoln, “the world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what he did here.”
If you weren’t present for Dr. Hren’s Farewell Lecture, please take some time to watch.
“When we praise a poet,” says T.S. Eliot, too often we isolate out those aspects of his verse which resemble least anyone else’s—which depart most surely from his predecessors. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot challenges the critic’s inclination to “pretend to find what is individual, what is the peculiar essence of the man,” and fixate upon this singularity “with satisfaction” Truth be told, no artist “has his complete meaning alone,” for his significance is indissolubly tied to “his relation to the dead poets and artists”. To gain fulsome appreciation of his achievement, you “must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead”. When we rid ourselves of the penchant for originality and invention in favor of situating the new in the stream of tradition, we may just find that “not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously.”
