Let's cut right to the chase. A handful of U.S. Catholic writers and books and essays and poems and songs are absolutely indispensable. These creative works should be required reading and/or listening for every man, woman, and child in the motley and miraculous clan of Catholic-works like most of Flannery O'Connor's stories and Willa Cather's lean, taut, perfect novel Death Comes for the Archbishop and Andre Dubus' last essays about Eucharist and forgiveness and painful love and all of J. F. Powers' extraordinary stories and Thomas Merton's riveting poem "Original Child Bomb" and Paul Wilkes' modern classic In Mysterious Ways: The Death and Life of a Parish Priest and Annie Dillard's stunning For the Time Being and Alice McDermott's exquisite novel Charming Billy and...

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's approach this in sensible journalistic fashion and try to be orderly about it all, for I have learned a few things after forty years of maniacally reading American Catholic literature. One: Catholicism in the U.S. has hatched some of the finest writers in the history of our nation, some of whom are working at a high pitch even as you read this.

Two: American Catholic writing is vigorous, alive, and more curious and challenging than ever; the stresses and strains in the Church Eternal and the Church's increasingly crucial countercultural role in the modern world have widened and welcomed new voices of power and passion-voices often expressed on the Web.

Three: Hundreds of interesting, erudite, committed, and talented Catholic writers in the U.S. are both alive and already home in the Light. If there were ale enough and time, we could spend many hours talking about them, and what a hilarious conjunction of names and stories that would be: Myles Connolly's Mr. Blue and Breece Pancake's lone lovely book of haunted stories, Peggy Noonan's essays and Andrew Greeley's articles, Dorothy Day's letters and Garry Wills' adventurous books...