Category: Literature
Tolkien and Violence
There’s a further Tolkien-related question that needs to be discussed after last week’s comments by George RR Martin, concerning the role of violence in Tolkien’s legendarium. Martin asked in the interview if Aragorn hunted down and killed all the orcs after...
Things I’ve Learned From C.S. Lewis
The world didn’t take much notice of C.S. Lewis on November 22, 1963, the day he died. It was too frenzied by the shocking assassination of John F. Kennedy, which occurred in Dallas about an hour after Lewis died in...
When the Story Stops Telling Itself: A New Letter from C.S. Lewis
As the author of the bestselling children’s stories The Chronicles of Narnia, C.S. Lewis inspired many young readers to take up the pen and write him in response. And they did not write in vain. It is well known that he replied...
Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Modern Literature?
Back during the halcyon days of the Bush administration (ha!), I read a piece in Touchstone which bemoaned the dearth of Evangelical modern literature. Evangelical professor David T. Williams surveyed the fiction produced by his tradition over the past century...
A Reading Guide for 2013
In the Andersonian fashion of asking questions, I submit that one of our urgent questions is this: What are the possibilities of the vita contemplativa in the late modern world? In Human, All Too Human, Friedrich Nietzsche lamented, “Because there...
Home: An Essay on The Little Way of Ruthie Leming
“We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” – T. S. Eliot Home. It’s a mythic notion. Two of the three...
A distant, glorious echo: Tolkien and typology
In his foreword to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien boldy declares his dislike of allegory and notes that, whatever critics and readers have suggested, the novel is most certainly not an allegory. Nonetheless, Christian readers...
Romance in Pride and Prejudice: Sometimes, We Settle
It is axiomatic that an artist’s work will be admired and disdained for a single set of qualities. Some admire the breadth and passion of Beethoven while others find his stamina and pathos tedious. Some admire the precision and pacing...
Jackson and Tolkien: Hollywood’s Infatuation With Angst
Matt’s piece on The Lord of the Rings a few weeks ago nicely summed up one of the major ways in which Peter Jackson’s view of the world diverges from Tolkien’s: its profoundly different moral vision. But Jackson’s storytelling sense...
Ruminations on Joy
A few weeks ago I read Zadie Smith’s essay, “Joy,” in the New York Review of Books. If you haven’t read it already, I highly recommend doing so. It’s a beautifully written, decidedly contemporary reflection on joy with a tone...