Newman, Tolkien, and the Perils of Beauty-2024 Annual Newman Lecture with Dr. David O'Connor

Collegium Institute's 2024 Annual Newman Lecture, "Newman, Tolkien & the Perils of Beauty," given by Dr. David O'Connor on February 21, 2024
"Saints are not literary men," worried the literary St. John Henry Newman. Newman recognized something unruly and restless in his own creative mind. No one has explored this anxiety in Newman's thought more deeply and creatively than J.R.R. Tolkien. Tolkien's beautiful and perilous female figures in The Lord of the Rings are an unsettling transfiguration of Newman's own comforting vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

[@Stupidityindex]

Absolute rubbish, "faith and reason are not in tension" It is the God delusion which allows for such farcical thoughts. "It is by faith we trade a cow for magic beans & thereby ascend to heaven." Bovine 3:21 It is amusing to hear the profound arrogance of someone knowing of God, as if He were known outside of fiction. The believer & the literate are separated by the vocabulary of fiction: Blasphemy, God, faith, prayer, prophet, etc. Matthew 17:20 He replied, “Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” I like asking believers how they can possibly think their faith is respectable, given Jesus said faith is worthless, since you can't expect obedience when ordering mountains to move? Freud wrote, "The antidote to Christianity is literacy". Blasphemy is a fiction vocabulary word. Blasphemy is a victimless crime. Believers have a profound lack of quality-control, so we are to pretend their God made Mormons so Christians would know how Jews feel. Like Book tag

[@exiledskunk5046]

Who hurt you?