Marginal Christianity

I am a Scrooge at Christmas, I admit it. It frustrates my wife. Exasperated, she asked me the other night why I dislike Christmas so much. I’ve been thinking about how I would answer that since then. As far as I can tell, I think a certain experience, family experience, and theological development play key roles. That certain experience happened when I was about 10 years old. My family went to the Christmas Eve service at our church. We arrived late enough to find empty space only on the first pew. I was seated on the aisle. As the choir began to process down the aisle to the choir loft past me, I suddenly burst into tears. Sobbing uncontrollably, my parents tried to settle me down without drawing embarrassing attention to my outburst. I could not explain why I was crying. But after I settled down a bit, I realized that the onset of the service sparked a question in my mind that I couldn’t get rid of and it saddened me deeply. “Why did they have to kill him (Jesus)?” was the q...

Gerry Canavan   (some spoilers near the end of the post, though I try to be vague) Not long after completing The Lord of the Rings,  J.R.R. Tolkien briefly began work on a sequel called The New Shadow,   set 100 to 150 years later during the reign of Aragorn’s son Eldarion. (The main link between the two stories is the minor character Beregond, the noble but disgraced soldier of Gondor whose son, Borlas, would have been a major character in The New Shadow .)  The New Shadow  reveals that the eucatastrophic fairy-tale ending of  The Return of the King  was extremely short-lived; with the Elves and the Wizards gone from Middle-earth, the Dwarves moving underground, and the Hobbits now isolated in what amounts to an enclave in the Shire, Men are quickly falling back into their old bad habits. In fact the Men of Gondor already seem to have forgotten much of the details of the War of the Ring, even though it remains in liv...

http://mereorthodoxy.com/tolkien-violence/ posted in  Literature ,  War/International Relations on  May 5, 2014   by Jake Meador 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 his ascent to the throne, “even the little baby orcs in their orc cradles?” As it happens, this is a terrible way of raising an interesting point. We need to talk about violence in Tolkien if we are to talk intelligently about his politics, but talking about the orcs is the wrong way of doing that. Tolkien is fairly dodgy about the origins of the orc, but the best hints we have are that orcs were originally elves who joined with Morgoth, the original Dark Lord for whom Sauron was a mere lieutenant. Due to their allegiance to Morgoth, the orcs were, by definition, ev...

http://www.dominicanablog.com/2014/03/25/the-annunciation-and-the-one-ring/ By: Br. Isaac Augustine Morales, O.P. | March 25, 2014 | Posted in: Books , Culture , Saints   In a seemingly insignificant detail in one of the appendices of his masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings , J. R. R. Tolkien notes that the destruction of the One Ring and the defeat of Sauron took place on March 25. What might have led Tolkien to date the destruction of the ring with such precision ? Being a devout Catholic, Tolkien most likely was subtly weaving into his work an ancient Christian tradition regarding the Solemnity of the Annunciation, the feast the Church celebrates today.   According to this tradition , the date of the Annunciation coincided with a number of significant events in salvation history. March 25 was not only the day on which Christ was conceived in Our Lady’s womb; it was also the day of the creation of the world, the day Adam and Eve fell, the day Abraham (n...