Tolkien’s Theology of Beauty

Tolkien’s Theology of Beauty PDF Author: Lisa Coutras
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137553456
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
In this book, Lisa Coutras explores the structure and complexity of J.R.R. Tolkien’s narrative theology, synthesizing his Christian worldview with his creative imagination. She illustrates how, within the framework of a theological aesthetics, transcendental beauty is the unifying principle that integrates all aspects of Tolkien’s writing, from pagan despair to Christian joy. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Christianity is often held in an unsteady tension with the pagan despair of his mythic world. Some critics portray these as incompatible, while Christian analysis tends to oversimplify the presence of religious symbolism. This polarity of opinion testifies to the need for a unifying interpretive lens. The fact that Tolkien saw his own writing as “religious” and “Catholic,” yet was preoccupied with pagan mythology, nature, language, and evil, suggests that these areas were wholly integrated with his Christian worldview. Tolkien’s Theology of Beauty examines six structural elements, demonstrating that the author’s Christianity is deeply embedded in the narrative framework of his creative imagination.

Tolkien’s Theology of Beauty

Tolkien’s Theology of Beauty PDF Author: Lisa Coutras
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137553456
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 281

Get Book Here

Book Description
In this book, Lisa Coutras explores the structure and complexity of J.R.R. Tolkien’s narrative theology, synthesizing his Christian worldview with his creative imagination. She illustrates how, within the framework of a theological aesthetics, transcendental beauty is the unifying principle that integrates all aspects of Tolkien’s writing, from pagan despair to Christian joy. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Christianity is often held in an unsteady tension with the pagan despair of his mythic world. Some critics portray these as incompatible, while Christian analysis tends to oversimplify the presence of religious symbolism. This polarity of opinion testifies to the need for a unifying interpretive lens. The fact that Tolkien saw his own writing as “religious” and “Catholic,” yet was preoccupied with pagan mythology, nature, language, and evil, suggests that these areas were wholly integrated with his Christian worldview. Tolkien’s Theology of Beauty examines six structural elements, demonstrating that the author’s Christianity is deeply embedded in the narrative framework of his creative imagination.

Creation and Beauty in Tolkien's Catholic Vision

Creation and Beauty in Tolkien's Catholic Vision PDF Author: Michael John Halsall
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 1532641109
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 295

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Book Description
This book invites readers into Tolkien’s world through the lens of a variety of philosophers, all of whom owe a rich debt to the Neoplatonic philosophical tradition. It places Tolkien’s mythology against a wider backdrop of Catholic philosophy and asks serious questions about the nature of creation, the nature of God, what it means to be good, and the problem of evil. Halsall sets Tolkien alongside both his contemporaries and ancient authors, revealing his careful use of literary devices inspired by them to craft his own “mythology for England.”

Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians

Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians PDF Author: Alison Milbank
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567651355
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
This book takes Chesterton's 'natural theology' through fairytales seriously as a theological project appropriate to an intellectual attempt to return to faith in a secular age. It argues that Tolkien's fiction makes sense also as the work of a Catholic writer steeped in Chestertonian ideas and sharing his literary-theological poetics. While much writing on religious fantasy moves quickly to talk about wonder, Milbank shows that this has to be hard won and that Chesterton is more akin to the modernist writers of the early twentieth-century who felt quite dislocated from the past. His favoured tropes of paradox, defamiliarization and the grotesque have much in common with writers like T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and James Joyce and their use of the demotic as well as the 'mythic method'. Using Chesterton's literary rhetoric as a frame, the book sets out to chart a redemptive poetics that first decentres the reader from his habitual perception of the world, then dramatizes his self-alienation through the grotesque, before finding in that very alienation a sort of pharmakon through paradox and an embrace of difference. The next step is to change one's vision of the world beyond the self through magic which, paradoxically, is the means by which one can reconnect with the physical world and remove the fetishism and commodification of the object. Chesterton's theology of gift is the means in which this magic becomes real and people and things enter into reciprocal relations that reconnect them with the divine.

The Good News of the Return of the King

The Good News of the Return of the King PDF Author: Michael T. Jahosky
Publisher: Wipf and Stock
ISBN: 1725263130
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
"Although many people today reject Christianity for intellectual reasons, greater numbers of people are rejecting Christianity because it does not engage their imagination. Christians must not only demosntrate that the Christian worldview is true, but that it is also good, beautiful, and relevant. The Good News of the Return of the King: The Gospel in Middle-earth is a book that endeavors to show the truth, goodness, and beauty of Jesus Christ, the gospel, and the biblical metanarrative by engaging the imagination through J .R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, as well as The Hobbit and the Silmarillion. In this book, I propose that J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings is a story about what Jesus' parables are about: the good news about the return of the king. As a work of imaginative fiction similar to Jesus' parables, The Lord of the Rings can bypass both intellectual and imaginative objections to the gospel and pullk back the 'veil of familiarity' that obscures the gospel for many"--

The Philosophy of Tolkien

The Philosophy of Tolkien PDF Author: Peter Kreeft
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1681495317
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
While nothing can equal or replace the adventure in reading ; Tolkienಙs masterwork, The Lord of the ; Rings, Peter Kreeft says that the journey into its ; underlying philosophy can be another exhilarating ; adventure. Thus, Kreeft takes the reader on a voyage ; of discovery into the philosophical bones of Middle earth. ; He organizes the philosophical themes in The Lord of the ; Rings into 50 categories, accompanied by over 1,000 ; references to the text of Lord.Since many of the great ; questions of philosophy are included in the 50-theme ; outline, this book can also be read as an engaging ; introduction to philosophy. For each of the philosophical ; topics in Lord, Kreeft presents tools by which they can be ; understood. Illustrated.

The Beauty of the Lord

The Beauty of the Lord PDF Author: Jonathan King
Publisher: Lexham Press
ISBN: 1683590597
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 452

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Book Description
Why is God's beauty often absent from our theology? Rarely do theologians take up the theme of God's beauty—even more rarely do they consider how God's beauty should shape the task of theology itself. But the psalmist says that the heart of the believer's desire is to behold the beauty of the Lord. In The Beauty of the Lord, Jonathan King restores aesthetics as not merely a valid lens for theological reflection, but an essential one. Jesus, our incarnate Redeemer, displays the Triune God's beauty in his actions and person, from creation to final consummation. How can and should theology better reflect this unveiled beauty? The Beauty of the Lord is a renewal of a truly aesthetic theology and a properly theological aesthetics.

The Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien

The Worlds of J. R. R. Tolkien PDF Author: John Garth
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069119694X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
An illustrated journey into the life and imagination of one of the world's best-loved authors, Tolkien's Worlds provides a unique exploration of the relationship between the real and the fantastical and is an essential companion for anyone who wants to follow in Tolkien's footsteps.

Tree of Tales

Tree of Tales PDF Author: Trevor A. Hart
Publisher: Baylor University Press
ISBN: 1932792643
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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Book Description
"This work examines the theological relationship between creation and creativity in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. It does so by bringing together a synthesis of various disciplines and perspectives to the creativity of J.R.R. Tolkien. Hart and Khovacs provide a fresh reading of these important themes in Tolkien, and the result captures the multi-faceted nature of Tolkien's own vivid theology and literary imagination." --Amazon.com.

Tolkien's Sacramental Vision

Tolkien's Sacramental Vision PDF Author: Craig Bernthal
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781621380535
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
One of Tolkien's great appeals to readers is that he offers a world replete with meaning at every level. To read and reread Tolkien is to share his sense of wonder and holiness, to be invited into the presence of a "beauty beyond the circles of the world." It is to fall in love with a universe that has a beginning and an end, where good and bad are not subjective choices, but objective realities; a created order full of grace, though damaged by sin, in which friendship is the seedbed of the virtues, and where the greatest warriors finally become the greatest healers. A correspondent once told J. R. R. Tolkien that his work seemed illumined "by an invisible lamp." That lamp is the Church, and its light is the imaginative sensibility that we live in a sacramental world. This new book by the author of The Trial of Man examines in depth the influence of Catholic sacramentality on the thought and work of Tolkien, with major emphasis on The Lord of the Rings, but including his literary essays, epistolary poem "Mythopoeia," short story "Leaf by Niggle," and The Silmarillion. Here is a signal contribution to a deeper understanding of Tolkien, whose mythological world is meant to "recover" the meaning of our own as a grace-filled place, pointing toward its Creator.

The Nature of Middle-earth

The Nature of Middle-earth PDF Author: J. R. R. Tolkien
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0358454603
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 467

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Book Description
The first ever publication of J.R.R. Tolkien's final writings on Middle-earth, covering a wide range of subjects and perfect for those who have read and enjoyed The Silmarillion, The Lord of the Rings, Unfinished Tales, and The History of Middle-earth, and want to learn more about Tolkien's magnificent world. It is well known that J.R.R. Tolkien published The Hobbit in 1937 and The Lord of the Rings in 1954-5. What may be less known is that he continued to write about Middle-earth in the decades that followed, right up until the years before his death in 1973. For him, Middle-earth was part of an entire world to be explored, and the writings in The Nature of Middle-earth reveal the journeys that he took as he sought to better understand his unique creation. From sweeping themes as profound as Elvish immortality and reincarnation, and the Powers of the Valar, to the more earth-bound subjects of the lands and beasts of Númenor, the geography of the Rivers and Beacon-hills of Gondor, and even who had beards! This new collection, which has been edited by Carl F. Hostetter, one of the world's leading Tolkien experts, is a veritable treasure-trove offering readers a chance to peer over Professor Tolkien's shoulder at the very moment of discovery: and on every page, Middle-earth is once again brought to extraordinary life.