C.S. Lewis’ lesson to his friends and fans—and to us—is that the cultivation of the imagination might require more than reading and writing, but it requires no less. Readers likely know C.S. Lewis by the works of his imagination, first encountering him in the snowdrifts of the Narnian woods or on an omnibus bound for [...]
The man who sets out only to be human somehow becomes less than human. We ignore the highest things at our peril. Human things are finite, incomplete; nonetheless, they are real and worthy. They are worth keeping. For the truth of knowledge is measured by the knowable object. For it is because a thing is [...]
What will delight lovers of J.R.R. Tolkien most is the portrait of the man that is drawn in the pages of Holly Ordway's biography. In the final chapters, she summarizes his life as the extraordinary fleshed out in ordinary. While Tolkien is completing his magnum opus, he is also maintaining the daily routine of husband, [...]
"Christopher Dawson viewed the disintegration of Western culture as a far worse disaster than that of the fall of Rome," biographer Christina Scott writes. "For the one was material; the other would be a spiritual disaster which would strike directly at the moral foundations of our society and destroy not the outward form of civilization [...]
Liberal humanism has suffered from a twofold crisis. On the one hand, it is at war with the religion that nurtured it, and not only cannot make sense of its own history, but also is befuddled even by the “natural” spirituality of man. On the other hand, it has come to loathe the very kind [...]
We are made for the stars but rooted in the soil. We are made to seek spiritual realities, but we must use this world, this visible creation, to do so. How the brief life of a storied liberal arts program changed lives the world over. In 1967, at the age of forty-four, John Senior transferred [...]
Pope Pius, who had done more than anyone to make the Christian victory at Lepanto possible, is said to have burst into tears when news of it reached him. They have dared the white republics up the capes of Italy, They have dashed the Adriatic round the Lion of the Sea, And the Pope has [...]
The liturgical imagery of the priest connects directly to our concepts and language about God. It does so because our concepts and language about God are necessarily personal. We are called to be in a person to person relationship with God—a relationship of intentional love, and as human beings we can only relate personally through [...]
Truth is indeed stranger than fiction, and the ways of God more strange and more beautiful than anything the mind of man can fathom. What else could explain Father Dwight Longenecker's journey from undergraduate at Bob Jones University, to Anglican country parson, to Catholic priest for the diocese of Charleston? At the conclusion of the [...]
Father Dwight Longenecker’s account of his own life’s adventure is subtitled “a somewhat religious odyssey”, indicating that his life, like all our lives, is a journey, or a pilgrimage, or a quest, the goal of which is, or should be, to get to heaven. “I am in fact a Hobbit in all but size,” wrote [...]
How does one account for J.R.R. Tolkien’s seeming ability to live inside of mythology? He read it, he translated it, and he absorbed it. After all these grand things, he rewrote it. Yet, no matter how deeply he delved into the profound and pervasive paganisms of pre-Christian cultures, he never lost his ability to baptize [...]
My heart breaks for Tolkien's Denethor, whose life ended unnecessarily, as bitterness, anger, and hopelessness in the face of evil consumed him. Let our prayer be that, even as we observe the darkness at the doorstep of Western Civilization, we imaginative conservatives stand at our posts and look to the Heavenly Father as our protector. [...]
Against the reductionist nowhere man who cannot love his nowhere neighbour because he does not love his nowhere God, Chesterton presents us with the Everlasting Man, Jesus Christ, the personification of the good, the true and the beautiful, who is the incarnation of perfect wisdom and perfect innocence. My first book, Wisdom and Innocence: A [...]
While Tolkien never approached theology in a systematic or even quasi-systematic way, his statements on the subject—littered throughout his collected letters—read as a Catholic version of Heraclitus’ "Fragments" or a mythic version of St. Josemaria’s "The Way." They shed great light not only on Tolkien, but on us. Though C.S. Lewis will always and understandably [...]