Ron Hansen and the Catholic Imagination

From Omaha to Santa Clara

Ron Hansen was born in 1947 in Omaha, Nebraska, into a Catholic family, and attended Creighton Jesuit Preparatory School before earning a B.A. in English from Creighton University. He served in the U.S. Army, studied at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop under John Irving, and held a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship at Stanford University in 1977–78.

Hansen completed an M.A. in Spirituality at Santa Clara University in 1995, deepening his engagement with Jesuit traditions that had shaped him since high school. He was ordained a permanent deacon for the Diocese of San Jose in 2007 and has served on the faculty of Santa Clara University for decades. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including Mariette in Ecstasy (1991), Atticus (1996), and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (1983), adapted into an Oscar-nominated film in 2007.

The Catholic Imagination

Hansen has described his Catholicism as the water in which he swims. “Because of my Catholicism,” he said in a 2014 interview, “I’m pretty sure Catholic themes or attitudes are at least subterranean in whatever I write. And I suspect many Catholic readers who did not know I was a co-religionist would find an affinity for my fiction without being able to put a finger on why.”

What that subterranean Catholicism produces is a particular quality of moral seriousness: the conviction that every person is made in the image of God and therefore of infinite worth, combined with an unflinching acknowledgment of what human beings actually do with that worth. Grace, in Hansen’s fiction, is not a comfortable thing. It arrives through suffering and requires something from the person who receives it.

This places him in the tradition of Flannery O’Connor and Graham Greene, both of whom he cites as influences. O’Connor famously argued that for the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures. Hansen does not shout exactly — his prose is more restrained — but the underlying conviction is the same: that reality has a theological structure, and that fiction which ignores this structure is describing a smaller world than the one that actually exists.

“Fiction at its best is an act of love toward the reader.” — Ron Hansen

Mariette and Atticus

Mariette in Ecstasy (1991) is set in a rural New York convent in 1906, where a seventeen-year-old postulant begins to show evidence of the stigmata. The novel refuses to resolve the question of whether her experience is genuine — not out of agnosticism about the supernatural but out of fidelity to the difficulty of knowing, and to the community’s own conflicted responses: envy, devotion, skepticism, love.

Atticus (1996) is a reworking of the parable of the prodigal son, set in Colorado and Mexico, in which an aging rancher travels to retrieve his son’s body after an apparent suicide. It is the most direct sustained meditation on grace in Hansen’s work — a love that does not require the loved one to be good, or present, or even alive. It was a finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award.

Hansen also wrote Exiles (2008), which interweaves the story of the 1875 shipwreck of the SS Deutschland — which killed five young nuns — with the story of Gerard Manley Hopkins writing The Wreck of the Deutschland in response. Hopkins is one of Hansen’s most important literary influences; the Jesuit poet’s sense of inscape — the God-given particularity of each created thing — runs through Hansen’s own way of rendering people and places.

Principal Works

• Desperadoes – 1979
• The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford – 1983
• Nebraska (stories) – 1989
• Mariette in Ecstasy – 1991
• Atticus – 1996 – National Book Award finalist
• A Stay Against Confusion: Essays on Faith and Fiction – 2001
• Exiles – 2008
• The Kid – 2016