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Author: Alison Milbank
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2009-03-01
Total Pages: 201
ISBN-13: 0567390411
DOWNLOAD EBOOKOffers a new reading of Tolkien in terms of Chesterton's literary and theological project.
Author: Alison Milbank
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2009-01-01
Total Pages: 201
ISBN-13: 0567651355
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis 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.
Author: Peter Kreeft
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2009-09-03
Total Pages: 244
ISBN-13: 1681495317
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhile 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.
Author: Joshua Hren
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
Published: 2018-10-05
Total Pages: 219
ISBN-13: 1532650396
DOWNLOAD EBOOKPolitical philosophy is nothing other than looking at things political under the aspect of eternity. This book invites us to look philosophically at political things in J.R.R. Tolkien's legendarium, demonstrating that Tolkien's potent mythology can be brought into rich, fruitful dialogue with works of political philosophy and political theology as different as Plato's Timaeus, Aquinas' De Regno, Hobbes's Leviathan, and Erik Peterson's "Monotheism as a Political Problem." It concludes that a political reading of Tolkien's work is most luminous when conducted by the harmonious lights of fides et ratio as found in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. A broad study of Tolkien and the political is especially pertinent in that the legendarium operates on two levels. As a popular mythology it is, in the author's own words "a really long story that would hold the attention of readers, amuse them, delight them, and at times maybe excite them or deeply move them." But the stories of The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings contain deeper teachings that can only be drawn out when read philosophically. Written from the vantage of a mind that is deeply Christian, Tolkien's stories grant us a revelatory gaze into the major political problems of modernity--from individualism to totalitarianism, sovereignty to surveillance, terror to technocracy. As an "outsider" in modernity, Tolkien invites us to question the modern in a manner that moves beyond reaction into a vivid and compelling vision of the common good.
Author: Douglas Estes
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Published: 2024-08-22
Total Pages: 355
ISBN-13: 1978712642
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe Lord of the Rings and other works of J.R.R. Tolkien have had a far-reaching impact on culture in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In print and on film, Tolkien’s works seem to be incredible epics, but religious aspects are less obvious. Yet Tolkien himself stated in his letters that the chief conflicts of his epic works were “about God, and His sole right to divine Honour,” and whether Sauron can wrest and destroy all that is good in Middle-earth. It is from this that readers awaken to the theological truths that imbue Tolkien’s works. In Theology and Tolkien: Constructive Theology, an international group of scholars consider how Tolkien’s works (and Jackson’s interpretations) can help us build better theologies for use in our world today. From essays on the music of creation in the Ainulindalë, to angels, demons, and Balrogs, to Tolkien’s theology of God, providence, evil, and love, to the eschatology of the Final Chord of the Great Music, this book invites the reader to journey through Middle-earth as the contributors engage the theology of Tolkien’s works and its impact on the world.
Author: Lisa Coutras
Publisher: Springer
Published: 2016-08-03
Total Pages: 281
ISBN-13: 1137553456
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn 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.
Author: John C. Tibbetts
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2021-10-18
Total Pages: 222
ISBN-13: 1476643970
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis is a critical study of the great British man of letters G.K. Chesterton, devoted to the novels, stories and essays that explore the darker fringes of his wild imagination. "Everything is different in the dark," wrote Chesterton; "perhaps you don't know how terrible a truth that is." Chesterton's use of the theme of "gargoyles" provides the thematic structure of the book. It covers the detective stories of Father Brown and others, the locked rooms and miracle crimes in his writing, his status as a science fiction writer, and the riddles and paradoxes of three works--Job, The Man Who Was Thursday, and the play The Surprise. This volume also includes an interlude about Chesterton and Jorge Luis Borges and a robust appendix including interviews about the formation of Ignatius Press's Collected Chesterton.
Author: Michael D. Hurley
Publisher: Northcote House Pub Limited
Published: 2012
Total Pages: 136
ISBN-13: 0746312105
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA revaluation of the vast and vastly varied work of G.K. Chesterton through a literary reading of his philosophy, and a philosophical reading of his fiction. Novelist, essayist, poet, playwright, historian, journalist, Christian apologist, literary and social critic, G.K. Chesterton was one of the most protean and prolific writers of his age, perhaps of any age. Bernard Shaw called him a 'colossal genius.' This study determines the scale and quality of that genius, and considers why he has failed to gain the 'permanent claim on our loyalty' that T.S. Elliot believed he deserved. Interest in Chesterton today tends to be divided between those who enjoy his stories as an end in themselves, and those who argue his unique contribution to metaphysics. By comparing the ethical sympathies and literary style of his work across different genres, Michael D. Hurley brings Chesterton's divided selves together: to show how his achievement as a writer and a thinker are inseparable, and why his philosophy must therefore be read aesthetically, and his fiction read philosophically.
Author: Duncan Reyburn
Publisher: Lutterworth Press
Published: 2017-08-31
Total Pages: 312
ISBN-13: 0718846001
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe jovial journalist, philosopher, and theologian G.K. Chesterton felt that the world was almost always in permanent danger of being misjudged or even overlooked, and so the pursuit of understanding, insight, and awareness was his perpetual preoccupation. Being sensitive to the boundaries and possibilities of perception, he believed that it really was possible, albeit in a limited way, to see things as they are. Duncan Reyburn, marrying Chesterton's unique perspective with the discipline of philosophical hermeneutics, aims to outline what Chesterton can teach us about reading, interpreting, and participating in the drama of meaning as it unfolds before us in words and in the world. Chesterton's unique interpretive approach seems to be theimplicit fascination of all Chesterton scholarship to date, and yet this book is the first to comprehensively focus on the issue. By taking Chesterton back to his philosophical roots - via his marginalia, his approach to literary criticism, his Platonist-Thomist metaphysics, and his Roman Catholic theology - Reyburn explicitly and compellingly tackles the philosophical assumptions and goals that underpin his unique posture towards reality.
Author: Suzanne Bray
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Published: 2013-01-15
Total Pages: 285
ISBN-13: 1443845574
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAlthough certain aspects of C.S. Lewis’s work have been studied in great detail, others have been comparatively neglected. This collection of essays looks at Lewis’s life and work, and those of his friends and associates, from many different angles, but all connected through a common theme of identity. Questions of identity are essential to the understanding of any writer. The ways authors perceive themselves and who they are, the communities they belong to by birth or choice, inevitably influence their work. The way they present other people, real or fictional, are also rooted in their own conception of identity. In this volume, scholars from several countries examine gender and family roles; national, regional, racial and professional identities; membership of a particular church; ideological attachments and personal descriptions, either with regard to Lewis and those who knew him and influenced him, or in a study of their writings. Authors studied here include J.R.R. Tolkien, Dorothy L. Sayers, Charles Williams, George MacDonald and T.S. Eliot.
