8 Quotes by Joseph Loconte

If you turn Hell upside down, you’ll find ‘Made in Germany’ stamped on the bottom.

In the worlds of Tolkien and Lewis, the choices of the weak matter as much as those of the mighty. Here we are not left as orphans, for a force of Goodness stands ready to help. Here we meet Gandalf the Grey, the wisest and best of wizards, engaged in a titanic struggle against the Shadow that threatens Middle-earth; and Aslan, the fearsome Lion, who will pay any price to rescue Narnia from the “force of evil” that has entered it.

Mythmaking, what Tolkien calls “mythopoeia,” is a way of fulfilling God’s purposes as the Creator. By inventing a myth – by populating a world with elves and orcs, dragons and witches, gods and goddesses – the storyteller tries to retrieve the world he knew before man’s fall from grace.

As biographer George Sayer sums up the mood: “Most tutors encouraged their pupils above all to doubt.

Tolkien and Lewis were attracted to the genres of myth and romance not because they sought to escape the world, but because for them the real world had a mythic and heroic quality.

Tolkien and Lewis offer an understanding of the human story that is both tragic and hopeful: they suggest that war is a symptom of the ruin and wreckage of human life, but that it points the way to a life restored and transformed by grace. In.

Part of the achievement of Tolkien and Lewis was to reintroduce into the popular imagination a Christian vision of hope in a world tortured by doubt and disillusionment.

Here, then, is one of the most striking effects of the Myth of Progress. Even war itself – a process inherently destructive to human life and human societies – was believed to have regenerative properties.