Catholic Imagination Conference, focused on past and future, continues to grow

NOTRE DAME, IN – What began nine years ago as a small-scale effort to re-emphasize a Catholic consciousness in fiction, poetry, and other fine arts has now grown into something much more comprehensive.

The Biennial Catholic Imagination Conference (BCIC), founded in 2015 at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, began as a gathering of creatives and intellectuals determined to infuse a Catholic sensibility within American fine arts. Subsequent conferences have been hosted at Fordham University, New York (2017) the University of Loyola, Chicago (2019) and the University of Dallas (2022).

But as recently concluded Catholic Imagination Conference, October 31-November 2 at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend indicates, the Catholic “imagination” is now flowing over the whole gamut of literary arts. As such, one might wonder how this renewed Catholic imagination will influence society and the Church itself?

This year’s conference, held in conjunction with Notre Dame’s de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture, adopted the theme “Every Ancient, Ever New.” It certainly appears a wise choice. The conference attracted more than 1200 guests and featured approximately 175 presentations, ranging from poetry readings to theology and technology in the age of A.I. (artificial intelligence).

In welcoming participants to this year’s event, Jennifer Newsome Martin of the de Nicola Center said it’s essential to consider the Catholic imagination in the arts, and how the ”sacramental vision of reality continues to illuminate the contemporary world.”

In addition to discussions focused on traditional fine arts–fiction, poetry, music, architecture–this year’s event featured more emerging topics vying for attention in the public square. One such topic, “Vulnerable Bodies and the Catholic Imagination”, focused on finding space in the Catholic big tent for people with disabilities, particularly those on the autism spectrum or diagnosed with Down’s Syndrome. An oddly titled workshop, “Clumsy Worship”, discussed ways of overcoming “crying babies” and other prosaic distractions that might interfere with one’s full participation at Mass.

To be sure, there were several workshops dedicated to iconic Catholic writers such as Flannery O’Connor, Cormac McCarthy, Toni Morrison and Graham Greene, but more exotic genres—science fiction, fairy tales and ghost stories–enjoyed air time. And as might be expected, there were workshops examining the current state of Catholic publishing in both book and magazine/journal forms.

While many of the workshops exhibited a scholarly, academic tone, others were aimed at ordinary parishioners in the pew. For example, Michael Peppard, a professor of theology at Fordham University expounded on the spiritual exercises of Bruce Springsteen whose lesser-known song “Jesus Was an Only Son” from the 2005 album Devils and Dust, imagines the Christ’s thoughts on His sorrowful trek to Calvary.

At least two of the workshops discussed the idea of bringing a Catholic imagination into civil and political discourse, a much-needed consideration in times of division and cultural conflict. As well, speakers at a workshop focusing on engaging secular culture through a Catholic filter encouraged participants to take a “Beatitudes-like” or a quiet, prayerful attitude to interaction with the contemporary society.

One of the more popular presentations featured the new Masters of Fine Art (MFA) program at the University of St. Thomas in Houston. Described as a “school of the Catholic imagination,” the St. Thomas University MFA program emphasizes the “craft” of poetry and creative writing as colored by Catholic tradition.

MFA program co-founder James Matthew Wilson, also a poet and co-creator of the BCICs (and a contributor to CWR), outlined some of the aims of the program. “My own MFA program is wholly Catholic: its curriculum, its preparation of writers, are all formed and guided by the example of the Catholic tradition and the inspiration of the Church as giving form to reality and redeeming it,” he said, adding that many contemporary academies “are beholden to some pretty strange gods” and none of them have much to do with imagination and beauty.

Wilson emphasized that the St. Thomas University program would also be suitable for any aspiring writer who simply wanted to do a good job. “We are not walling off a provincial village, but building a cosmopolis, a place where all of reality can be explored through aesthetic form, where everything that is can be seen, known, and loved, and brought into the order of art. That’s what every—and I mean every—program ought to be doing.”

An artist’s perspective on the Catholic imagination’s re-emergence was presented by Dana Gioia, a distinguished poet, educator and onetime poet laureate for California. In many ways, Gioia’s 2014 booklet The Catholic Writer Today (Wiseblood Books) set the stage for the conferences and the apparent Catholic publishing boom.

In The Catholic Writer Today, Gioia (who is also one of the founding partners of the BCIC) lamented the disappearance of the Catholic voice, not only in the fine arts, but from the public square in general

“There is currently no vital or influential Catholic tradition evident in mainstream American culture,” Giona said in the book. “[There once was] a critical and academic milieu that discussed and supported the best Catholic writing [but] there has been a vast retrenchment of this intellectual milieu. “The Catholic voice is heard less clearly and less often in the public conversations that inform American culture.”

For Michael Murphy, Director of the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage at the University of Loyola in Chicago and an early supporter of the biennial event–the conferences are akin to “moveable feasts” that not only have gained in prominence and popularity but also have expanded the Catholic Imagination into new and exciting areas.

“The Catholic imagination, because it is focused on the theological soul of good art, needs to be good art first,” Murphy said. “The Catholic imagination, following the central mystery of our faith, is an incarnational, not didactic art. Sure, we learn vital things, but if artists try to bend experience to doctrine, the art will almost always fail.”

Murphy said it’s important for all Catholics, especially those with creative sensibilities to pay attention, develop vision, and hone craft so as to enter into the mystery and share what we see with others–precisely through craft–“as sacramental acts that encounter unflinchingly, dialog with creatively, and bends a knee gratefully to the Living God.”

Angela Alaimo-O’Donnell is a professor of Catholic Studies, as well as Associate Director of The Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University. She is also founding editor of the series “Studies in the Catholic Imagination” at Fordham University Press. She notes with some gratification the growth and expansion of the semi-annual events. “The Catholic Imagination Conference has succeeded in accomplishing what we had hoped for. Writers from across the country–as well as those from outside the U.S.–who identify as Catholic writers, are in communion with one another. We know each other, read and review one another’s work, and collaborate on projects that help to promote the Catholic Imagination.”

Both Murphy and Alaimo-O’Donnell cite the establishment of a number of Catholic publications and university level programs as the creative and academic offspring of the conferences. In addition to the MFA program at St. Thomas University, the BCIC has led to Presence, a journal of Catholic poetry, Wiseblood Books, the Flannery O’Connor Trust Series (Studies in the Catholic Imagination), and the Hank Center Graduate Summer Institute.

“The conferences have engendered a groundswell of excellent creative and scholarly activity,” Murphy added. “They have provided, perhaps most importantly, a much-needed community for writers, creators, readers, and thinkers of all stripes.”

In reflecting on the inspiration for the inaugural conference and the desire to see them flourish, Wilson outlined other motivations. “We do it because we understand the obligation in a way that it is easy for others to forget, and for that we owe the command of Christ who made everything, called it good, and even died for it. It’s hard to be provincial when you have the example of your God going down to hell to see what might be saved there … A lively literature, including a Catholic literature, will finally be judged not chiefly by how it is received today but how it looks from the perspective of eternity.”

This year’s conference concluded with a discussion among poets, novelists, and educators who speculated on the future of the Catholic Imagination project. Wilson suggested the effort would benefit from a purely literary sense by “a different Dante.”

“Dante had a vision that was capacious, moving horizontally through the contemporary world but vertically toward the last things, from the depths of hell to the height of paradise,” Wilson said. “It’s great that so many authors have captured the worldly angst of man as homo viator, as pilgrim in the world within the incipient Kingdom of God. … But it is also essential that we learn to see again the full scope of the world as cosmos and creation, as wounded but ordered whole, and as expression of the creative intellect of God. Sin is daily, but the divine light is everlasting. A truly revived Catholic literary culture will have the capacity to explore both by way of aesthetic form.”

The BCIC organizing group is already planning for the 2026 conference at a location most likely in the northeastern US. Although the central focus will continue to be fiction, poetry and the panoply of literary arts, the next conference will almost certainly add new elements in which a Catholic sensibility lends transcendence.

(Editor’s note: This story was edited for clarification on Nov. 15, 2024.)