St. Augustine and J.R.R. Tolkien

By |2024-02-15T20:13:18-06:00February 15th, 2024|Categories: Bradley J. Birzer, J.R.R. Tolkien, Literature, Myth, Senior Contributors, St. Augustine, StAR, Timeless Essays|

As did St. Augustine as the barbarians tore through Rome’s gate on August 24, 410, at midnight, J.R.R. Tolkien looked out over a ruined world: a world on one side controlled by ideologues, and, consequently, a world of the Gulag, the Holocaust camps, the Killing fields, and total war; on the other: a world of [...]

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth

By |2024-01-02T19:03:13-06:00January 2nd, 2024|Categories: Books, Bradley J. Birzer, Imagination, J.R.R. Tolkien, Myth, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

Myth, J.R.R. Tolkien thought, can convey the sort of profound truth that is intransigent to description or analysis in terms of facts and figures. But, Tolkien admitted, myth can be dangerous if it remains pagan. Therefore, one must sanctify it. To enter faerie—that is, a sacramental and liturgical understanding of creation—is to open oneself to [...]

Fantasy & the Real World: Tolkien’s Philosophy of Myth

By |2024-01-02T19:46:13-06:00January 2nd, 2024|Categories: Imagination, J.R.R. Tolkien, Joseph Pearce, Myth, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

Fantasy shows us ourselves in the light of the fullness of the natural and supernatural reality in which we find ourselves. Does so-called fantasy literature have any relevance to the so-called real world? Such a question is worth asking and indeed answering but can only be addressed if we have a clear understanding of what [...]

Awakening the Moral Imagination

By |2023-10-30T19:02:42-05:00October 29th, 2023|Categories: Essential, Imagination, Literature, Moral Imagination, Myth, Timeless Essays|

The beauty of fairy tales is their ability to attractively depict character and virtue. Goodness glimmers while wickedness and deception are unmasked. Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Vigen Guroian as he explores the benefits fairy tales afford children. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher The notion that fairy tales [...]

Myths versus Novels

By |2023-05-21T11:28:40-05:00April 11th, 2023|Categories: E.B., Eva Brann, Fiction, Literature, Myth, Senior Contributors, St. John's College, Timeless Essays, Virginia Woolf|

Although myths and novels belong to different categories, they are alike in being the venues of human figures who are not presented as images of actually existent, “real-world” people. They have their being in a specific work of art, a drama or a narrative, such as the “Oresteia,” or a novel, such as Edith Wharton’s [...]

America’s “Logres”: The Mythology of a Nation

By |2023-03-19T19:16:50-05:00March 19th, 2023|Categories: American Republic, C.S. Lewis, Culture, Flannery O'Connor, Imagination, Literature, Myth, Timeless Essays|

C.S. Lewis believed that every nation possesses what he called a “haunting,” a “Logres,” which baptizes it with a unique inner life. What, or where, is America’s Logres? Who is the mythological hero that could guide the American identity the way Arthur guided Britain and inspired generations of English poets and artists? During my undergraduate [...]

Metamorphosis by Love

By |2023-03-24T10:03:38-05:00February 13th, 2023|Categories: Great Books, Imagination, Literature, Love, Myth, Paul Krause, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” is many things: several stories, some bleak, some uplifting, ranging from the creation of the world to the apotheosis of Julius Caesar. Yet in its most fundamental form, his epic love poem of many stories reveals deep truths in its poetic proclamations of the transformative power, and spirit, of love. Ovid was one [...]

Demythologizing Christmas

By |2022-12-29T19:47:40-06:00December 29th, 2022|Categories: Christmas, Dwight Longenecker, History, Myth, Senior Contributors|

When the demythologization of the Christmas story is completed, we find in the infancy narratives of Luke and Matthew stories that are rooted in eyewitness accounts. It is okay to decorate the Christmas tree. It is my modest hope, however, that we will see the decorations for what they are, and in seeing them, appreciate [...]

The God in the Cave

By |2023-12-24T08:26:36-06:00December 24th, 2022|Categories: Christendom, Christianity, Christmas, Existence of God, G.K. Chesterton, Myth, Philosophy, Religion, Timeless Essays, Truth|

Christ was not only born on the level of the world, but even lower than the world. The first act of the divine drama was enacted, not only on no stage set up above the sightseer, but on a dark and curtained stage sunken out of sight. This sketch of the human story began in [...]

The Monster and the Christians

By |2022-07-13T17:58:46-05:00July 13th, 2022|Categories: Beowulf, Christianity, David Deavel, Easter, Literature, Myth, Senior Contributors, Timeless Essays|

Like Beowulf, we can fight the dragons in our lives with joy and hope, for the Great Dragon had his death blow on the original D-Day when a man walked out of a tomb two thousand years ago. The Lutheran theologian Oscar Cullman famously compared the death and resurrection of Christ to D-Day. After the [...]

Athena as Founder & Statesman

By |2022-06-10T13:52:50-05:00June 10th, 2022|Categories: Essential, Justice, Literature, Myth, Politics, Religion, Statesman, Timeless Essays|

In the "Oresteia," Aeschylus examines whether a city exists for proper worship of gods or whether it exists for proper cultivation of “that which is most divine in us.” Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to join John Alvis, as he considers Aeschylus' views of the polity as embodied by [...]

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