Talks began at 7:30, after a 5:30 dinner at the Morris Inn with the speaker and a small group of 6-8 undergraduates.
Series Schedule:
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
141 DeBartolo Hall, 7:30 PM
Ralph C. Wood
"J.R.R. Tolkien: A Catholic Writer for Our Uncatholic Age"
Tuesday, November 1, 2005
102 DeBartolo Hall, 7:30 PM
Joseph Pearce
"Tolkien: Truth and Myth"
Tuesday, November 8, 2005
141 DeBartolo Hall, 7:30 PM
Mary Keys
"J.R.R. Tolkien's Literary Politics of Friendship and Humility"
Tuesday, November 15, 2005
141 DeBartolo Hall, 7:30 PM
Greg Wright
"Missing the Spirit: The Scouring of the Shire, Tolkien's Catholicism and Peter Jackson's Return of the King"
More About Our Speakers
Ralph C. Wood, University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from Texas A&M University at Commerce, as well as M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago. From 1971 to1997 he taught at Wake Forest University in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he held the John Allen Easley Professorship in Religion. During the 1997-98 academic year, he was Distinguished Professor of Religion at Samford University in Birmingham, Alabama. At Baylor he teaches in the departments of English and Religion, as well as the Truett Theological Seminary. His major book, first published in 1988 and still in print from the University of Notre Dame Press, is entitled The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists (Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, John Updike, and Peter De Vries). He also serves as an editor-at-large for the Christian Century, and on the editorial board of the Flannery O'Connor Review. His most recent books are Contending for the Faith: The Church's Engagement with Culture (Baylor University, 2003), The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-earth (Westminster John Knox, 2003) and Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Eerdmans, 2004). His book on Tolkien has sold more than 25,000 copies, and he has been invited to give dozens of lectures on Tolkien and O'Connor at major universities and churches across the U. S. and Canada.
Joseph Pearce is the internationally acclaimed author of 14 books, which include bestsellers such as G.K. Chesterton: Wisdom and Innocence (Ignatius , 1997), Literary Converts (Ignatius, 2000), Tolkien: Man and Myth (Ignatius, 2001), Solzhenitsyn: A Soul in Exile (Baker Books, 2001), and Old Thunder: A Life of Hilaire Belloc (Ignatius, 2002). Joseph Pearce is a world-recognized biographer of modern Christian literary figures. Pearce's books have been published and translated into over eight languages.
Pearce converted to the Catholic faith in 1989 as a result of "becoming friends" with several 20 th-century literary figures he researched who had been Christians, and ultimately converts to Catholicism - particularly G.K. Chesterton. As a younger man, Pearce was "extremely anti-Catholic" and even had opposed Pope John Paul II's visits to England. His earlier viewpoint gradually shifted as he learned more about the writings and beliefs of the literary converts he would eventually profile.
As Writer in Residence and professor of literature at Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida since September 2001, Pearce also serves as Editor of the Saint Austin Review, a trans-Atlantic monthly cultural review. A native of Great Britain, Pearce relocated to the United States in 2001 to serve at Ave Maria University. He is also contributing writer to a number of newspapers and magazines in the United Kingdom, U.S. and Canada.
An accomplished tutor, teacher and speaker, Pearce has participated and lectured at a wide variety of international and literary events at major colleges and universities in the U.S., Britain, Europe and Canada. He is also a regular guest on national and international television and radio programs, and has served as consultant for film documentaries on J.R.R. Tolkien and Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Mary Keys, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Notre Dame, graduated summa cum laude in Political Science from Boston College and received both her Masters and Ph. D. from the University of Toronto in that field. Professor Keys joined the Notre Dame faculty in 1998, and her research and teaching interests include ethics and political philosophy, history of political philosophy, religion and political philosophy and politics and literature. Much of her work, including her doctoral dissertation, has focused on the problem of the common good and the contemporary relevance of Thomas Aquinas. Professor Keys has been awarded a number of fellowships and grants, including a senior research fellowship at the Martin Marty Center at the University of Chicago and the Earhart Foundation Fellowship, both for her work on the “Humility and Modernity” project. She has also published a number of articles, book chapters and book reviews on various aspects of political science. She has shown a special interest in political theory as it appears in the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. She has won a “Best Paper Award” at the American Political Science Association Annual Meeting for her piece entitled “Tolkien’s Tales and Political Philosophy in Liberal Democracy.” She also teaches a University Seminar at Notre Dame entitled "Politics and Literature: J.R.R. Tolkien.”
Greg Wright is Writer in Residence at Puget Sound Christian College in Everett, Washington. He is the author of Tolkien in Perspective: Sifting the Gold from the Glitter and Peter Jackson in Perspective: The Power Behind Cinema's The Lord of the Rings. His academic work on Tolkien began in 1999 with his contributions to the website HollywoodJesus.com, for which he is now Senior Editor. He recently edited a collection of essays entitled Two Roads through Narnia, and in 2006 Inkling Books will be publishing Salvation for Hobbits, a record of his correspondence with novelist Regina Doman. Greg is also an ordained minister of the dramatic arts, and has degrees in Theology, English Literature and Computer Science. With three plays to his credit, including a three-act Western adaptation of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, he is now working on a series of Western novellas, the first volume of which is tentatively titled West of the Gospel.
