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The titles lining the shelves labeled “fiction” in your typical evangelical bookstore will not be sold in a hundred years. Those novels will never be taught in a college classroom as literature, and they will never transform anyone’s heart, mind, or soul. Rather, those books are meant preach to the choir. And, I mean preach. The reason that Protestants do not create as much literature as their Catholic counterparts has more to do with ecclesiastical habits than with theology. While there are many Protestants who have written phenomenal novels (Marilynne Robinson comes to everyone’s minds, but also think of Larry...

Full title: "The Ring is trying to get back to its master!"-J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, & Washington's Farewell Warning The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien describes man's insatiable lust for "the Ring of Power," as Gandalf exclaimed: "Always remember Frodo, the Ring is trying to get back to its master. It wants to be found." When Frodo offered the Ring to Gandalf, Gandalf rebuked him, saying: "Don't tempt me Frodo! I dare not take it. Not even to keep it safe. Understand, Frodo. I would use this ring from a desire to do good ... But...

“Actually I am a Christian,” Tolkien wrote of himself, “and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect ‘history’ to be anything but a ‘long defeat’— though it contains (and in legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory” (Letters 255). +++ History as a long defeat – I can think of nothing that is more anti-modern than this sentiment expressed by J.R.R. Tolkien. It is a thought perfectly in line with the fathers and the whole of Classical Christian teaching. And it’s anti-modernism reveals much about the dominant heresy of our...

Full header: What politicians can learn from Tolkien, Bill Federer recounts famous author's understanding of evils of human nature The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien describes man's insatiable lust for "the Ring of Power," as Gandalf exclaimed: "Always remember Frodo, the Ring is trying to get back to its master. It wants to be found." When Frodo offered the Ring to Gandalf, Gandalf rebuked him, saying: "Don't tempt me Frodo! I dare not take it. Not even to keep it safe. Understand, Frodo. I would use this ring from a desire to do good. ... But through me,...

C.S. Lewis once said that courage is the “form of every virtue at its testing point.” It is easy to forget that figures such as Lewis, Tolkien, and even Chesterton, did not write during a time of Christian ascendancy. Lewis was denied a chair (a full professorship) at Oxford for years precisely because of his embarrassingly public profession of faith. To the “learned” sceptics around him, it made him seem “less than serious.” Tolkien was a devout, practicing Catholic, but was never as public as Lewis. Lewis wrote popular books on the topic and gave radio addresses. All of that...

Disney's new film Tolkien premiers this weekend, and the trailers promise an engrossing biopic, complete with scenes from the First World War. The movie aims to show how J.R.R. Tolkien's early life inspired the creative genius behind such works as The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, which are rightly recognized as classics and which both inspired epic film franchises (one far superior to the other). Yet the new Disney film cuts out some of the most important influences in his life. The movie does not once mention the great ex-atheist and Christian author C.S. Lewis, a close friend...

Yes, my precious, the preview will stoke your appetite for the upcoming adventure about the fantasy-writing author. ...

It was the fantasy trilogy that garnered critical acclaim, won 17 Oscars and launched the careers of stars including Orlando Bloom and Dominic Monaghan. And Netflix UK & Ireland have announced the iconic The Lord of the Rings trilogy will come to the streaming service on November 1. The original trilogy - The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King- based on the J.R.R Tolkien books, was released between 2001-2003.

A Maia or an Eldil would be the Tolkien or Lewis equivalent of a Power or Authority, a non-corporeal personal intelligence, known in from the Greek "messenger" as an Angel, near the middle of the nine choirs in Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite's De Coelesti Hierarchia, On the Celestial Hierarchy.Eru as God is properly called Eru Iluvatar in Tolkien's Silmarillioin.In Tolkien's Silmarillion and Lewis' Out of the Silent Planet, these intelligences worked to heal the deliberate destruction of the populated worlds by the very powerful, corrupted intellect, which Tolkien names Melkor/Morgoth, and Lewis seems not to name. That latter, evil being is...

What better way to celebrate #TolkienReadingDay than to hear from the author himself? Each year on March 25, Tolkien fans around the world mark the day by reading one of the many works penned by the popular Catholic author. According to the Tolkien Society, the annual event “has been organised by the Tolkien Society since 2003 to encourage fans to celebrate and promote the life and works of J.R.R. Tolkien by reading favorite passages.” Read more: Tolkien’s Middle-Earth love story, Beren and Luthien, to be published in 2017 The date of March 25 has special significance to fans and Catholics...

I was an atheist until i read “The Lord Of The Rings” by Fredric Heidemann December 16, 2016 I grew up in a loving, comfortable atheist household of professional scientists. My dad was a lapsed Catholic, and my mom was a lapsed Lutheran. From the time that I could think rationally on the subject, I did not believe in God. God was an imaginary being for which there was no proof. At best, God was a fantasy for half-witted people to compensate their ignorance and make themselves feel better about their own mortality. At worst, God was a perverse delusion...

On an early Sunday morning, September 20, 1931, three 30-something English professors took a stroll together on Addison’s Walk in the grounds of Magdalen College at the University of Oxford: 32-year-old C. S. Lewis (Fellow and Tutor of English Literature at Magdalen College, Oxford), 39-year-old J. R. R. Tolkien (Rawlinson and Bosworth Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford), and 35-year-old Hugo Dyson (Tutor and Lecturer at Reading University). Their time together had begun the evening before at dinner, but their conversation went late into the night.

Next month one Brooklyn theater will explore that question in a Monty Python-esque comedy entitled The Beatles Present ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Musical.” The writer and director of the show wanted to explore, in a comedic way, what might have happened had Tolkien given a green light to the original project proposed by The Beatles.Well before Peter Jackson took on the weighty task of bringing J.R.R. Tolkien’s realm of Middle-Earth to moviegoers, The Fab Four had approached the Catholic author in hopes of filling the roles of Frodo, Gandalf and company.During the 60s and 70s the highly successful...

IN the summer of 1916, a young Oxford academic embarked for France as a second lieutenant in the British Expeditionary Force. The Great War, as World War I was known, was only half-done, but already its industrial carnage had no parallel in European history. “Junior officers were being killed off, a dozen a minute,” recalled J. R. R. Tolkien. “Parting from my wife,” he wrote, doubting that he would survive the trenches, “was like a death.”

Google has fixed a bug in an online tool after it began translating "Russian Federation" to "Mordor". Mordor is the name of a fictional region nicknamed "Land of Shadow" in JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings books. In addition, "Russians" was translated to "occupiers" and the surname of Sergey Lavrov, the country's Foreign Minister, to "sad little horse". The errors had been introduced to Google Translate's Ukrainian to Russian service automatically, Google said.

124 years ago today, on January 3, 1892, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien was born in Bloemfontein Africa. Forty-five years later, in 1937, his book The Hobbit, was published which he had written for his children. Together with its sequel, The Lord of the Rings, it launched generations of readers on adventures through the invented world of Middle-earth that would impact many of us for the rest of our lives.

Turkey once again showed it can't take a joke, as a Turkish court ordered a panel of experts to assess the character of Gollum from The Lord of the Rings - to decide whether a doctor who compared President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the figure should be jailed. Dr. Bilgin Ciftci of Aydin is accused of "insulting" Erdogan by posting images online comically comparing Erdogan and Gollum, the fantasy creature with a personality split between good and evil who became a fan favorite for pining over the One Ring - better known as "my precious." The experts will determine whether...

The artifact provides an amazing insight into Tolkien's mind - including his observation that Hobbiton is on the same latitude as the city of Oxford. It also suggests that Ravenna in Italy is the inspiration behind Minas Tirith, a fictional city that became the heavily fortified capital of Gondor. And it references Cyprus, Belgrade and Jerusalem.

An important, and frankly amazing Tolkien document has emerged, recently discovered loose in a copy of The Lord of the Rings once owned by illustrator Pauline Baynes. The Guardian reports that Baynes removed the map from a previous version of the novel as she was working on a then new color map for a new edition that was published in 1970. The map then had “copious” notes made by J.R.R. Tolkien in green ink and pencil. Baynes then made her own notes on the map. It is essentially a map annotated by Tolkien himself.

On Thursday JRR Tolkien's early story The Story of Kullervo will be published for the first time. The dark tale reveals that Tolkien's Middle Earth was inspired not only by England and Wales… but also by Finland. "Hapless Kullervo," Tolkien called him. Kullervo, an orphan boy raised into slavery, a tragic hero who commits incest in the dark forests of Karelia and hurls himself on his own blade.