New MFA Program In Houston Aims To Further Catholic Literary Tradition

The Italian poet Dante is shown holding a copy of his “Divine Comedy”, next to the entrance to Hell, the seven terraces of Mount Purgatory and the city of Florence, with the spheres of Heaven above, in Domenico di Michelino's 1465 fresco. Creative Commons image.

NEW YORK— If you walk into New York’s most famous bookstore, The Strand, you’ll see thousands and thousands of eye-catching titles, all asking you to let them sit on your nightstand. It isn’t until you go downstairs and walk behind a dark corner that you will find the “religion” section and a small shelf labeled “Christian.” 

While some books in this section may be self-help titles, works by Christians that represent foundational texts in Western Civilization, theology, history and philosophy might also appear there. But fiction, poetry and other forms of literature written by Christian people such as Flannery O’Connor and Marilynn Robinson often appear in other sections of the bookstore with no designation for religion. 

Dr. James Matthew Wilson said when he was an undergraduate student and an aspiring writer at the University of Michigan, this kind of dichotomy that does not recognize religious fiction and literature bothered him. 

“I came to the Catholic Church through the life of the arts, because the arts, when they are doing what they are supposed to do, are one of the most profound ways we can discover reality and encounter reality,” he said in an interview with ReligionUnplugged.com. “It was through asking myself, ‘Why do stories have the capacity and the ability to change the mind and the soul?’ where I came to know that the beliefs of the Catholic Church were true.”

Wilson and others are launching an online Masters of Fine Arts program at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, which is taking applications for students to start in the fall. They have rolling admissions and are accredited by the accrediting body responsible for all UST programs, which is SACSCOC. They have already accepted their first class of students and Wilson says, “it will be large, as there was a great deal of interest in the program.” They have assembled a stable of faculty that includes author and blogger Rod Dreher, California’s poet laureate Dana Gioia and Jessica Hooten Wilson (no relation to James Matthew Wilson). Their aim is to train generations of writers steeped in the Catholic literary tradition. 

“I’m hoping our program will not be a niche program that is intended for a small group of writers, but instead a fine arts program that will help artists maintain and advance the great mission of literature,” Wilson said. “Our love for God and Catholicism keeps us attentive to truth, to beauty, to reality, and it’s only when you have convictions about those things that the drama of human life really makes sense.” 

The MFA degree is a terminal degree for various fields in the fine arts such as painting, design, playwriting and creative writing. The first university to admit students to an MFA program was the University of Iowa in 1940. The degree aims to promote artistic excellence in all forms. 

Yale University may be one of the most vaunted MFA programs for art, design and architecture. When it comes to literature, MFA programs at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop at the University of Iowa, UCLA, Columbia University and others are notable. Few Christian colleges and universities - Protestant or Catholic - have developed MFA programs in the past. University of St. Thomas appears to be one of the few schools offering an MFA from that perspective. However, while not from a Catholic perspective but a general Christian one, Seattle Pacific University offers a similar program, which began in 2005 and is now entering its 17th year. Currently, they have 43 students enrolled, with two mentors in each of their four genres—poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction and young adult fiction. They have quite a high success rate, with many of their alumni going on to publish books with top publishers like Penguin and Simon & Schuster.

Alissa Wilkinson, a film critic at Vox and a professor at The King’s College, a private Christian college in New York City, earned an MFA in creative writing from Seattle Pacific’s low-residency program. “There are a lot of faculty spread out across MFA programs in the U.S. at non-religious colleges who nonetheless write from a [faith] perspective and may be great supervisors,” she said. 

She suggests top young writers from faith backgrounds interested in the “big three” creating writing disciplines (fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction), in addition to considering programs like SPU and St. Thomas, might also consider applying to Iowa Writer’s Workshop to study with a faculty member like Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Marilynne Robinson or apply to the Sewanee School of Letters in Tennessee to study with novelist Jamie Quatro. 

Dr. Jim Dahlman, a journalism professor at Milligan University in Tennessee, earned his MFA in nonfiction from Goucher University, a school that started with Christian roots but is now largely secular. Dahlman said writers searching for an MFA program may check out the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), which has a list of writing programs. 

Leaders of the University of St. Thomas MFA program believe theirs is unique in that it is the only program explicitly devoted to the renewal of the Catholic literary tradition. Their mission is clear. Their website says they, “propose nothing less than a revival of the literary arts in our day, one that will recommit them [students] to the serious achievement of craft and scope of spiritual and intellectual depth worthy of the tradition we inherit and the reader’s attention for which we call.” 

As a Catholic University, the MFA draws inspiration from the Catholic literary tradition from writers such as Virgil, Dante and Flannery O’Connor. The program is a two-year program that is entirely online, totaling to 30 credits total.

What makes the program special is not only that it’s unique, but that it is stepping into completely new territories. “There are more than 200 MFA programs in the United States,” according to its website. “The MFA at the University of St. Thomas is the only one committed expressly to a renewal of the craft of literature within the cosmic scope, long memory and expansive vision of the Catholic literary and intellectual tradition.” 

The two founding faculty members, Wilson and Dr. Joshua Hren, have years of literary experience as teachers, writers and publishers. Wilson, an outgoing professor of humanities at Villanova University, will serve as head of the poetry section and Hren, a publisher of Wiseblood Books, will lead the creative writing side of the program. 

Additionally, the poet Dana Gioia, who served as the chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts between 2003-2009, will be a visiting faculty. Some of his works include “The Catholic Writer Today: And Other Essays”, “Can Poetry Matter?” and “Interrogations at Noon”. 

Jessica Hooten Wilson, a visiting faculty at University of St. Thomas, recently tweeted, “what would Christian churches be like if Sunday school included studying Biblical Hebrew and Greek? What about classes in poetry? Features of story? Church history? If we keep cutting humanities from Christian colleges, we’re cutting the legs out from under the faith.” 

She is the perfect embodiment of the type of writer that the program hopes to create. Her newest book, “Giving the Devil His Due: Demonic Authority in the Fiction of Flannery O'Connor and Fyodor Dostoevsky”, explores how Flannery O’Connor’s and Dostoevsky’s faith compelled them to tell stories of eternal life and eternal death. 

The intersection of these talented people is no coincidence. Dr. James Matthew Wilson told ReligionUnplugged.com about the birth of the program by recounting a story.

“Usually, a program starts because the university sees a need, or even the faculty within the university, but in this case, Joshua who was my publisher, was having dinner with a donor who really wanted to do something to help strengthen Catholic literary tradition within the United States. After that conversation, he began to reach out to various people he knew, which included me.” 

Coincidentally, this program has been a dream of Wilson’s since his 20s. 

“I reached the point at Villanova where I felt I knew how to teach and wasn’t getting a lot of new things out of the experience. This MFA program has given me a chance to flourish directly as a writer, an academic, but especially on poetry,” he said. “The university wants to be known as one of the great Catholic universities and they immediately saw that this was one of the ways in which they could fulfill this aim.”

Starting this MFA Program perfectly aligns with his vision for creating a more beautiful world.

“Life begins to appear flat to us when we lose sight of the intrinsic experience to the mystery of being whenever we look at something beautiful,” Wilson said. “This MFA program seeks to help writers encounter reality at a profound level, and encountering reality is the reason that people have always read.”

Jewels Tauzin is an intern reporter at ReligionUnplugged.com. She’s a student at Barnard College in New York City, where she also contributes to “Bwog”, a Columbia student newspaper. She has previously interned at the Mississippi Center of Investigative Reporting, Trinity Episcopal, at Girls’ Life magazine and at The Bridge: The Memphis Street Paper.