Oxford Tolkien Spring School

Here's a conference that looks great: lectures on Tolkien from experts in Oxford University, where he lived and worked for so many years.

Two interesting articles

There have been two interesting articles recently about faith in fiction. The first one, by Paul Elie in The New York Times, raises lots of questions and draws attention to a few books that are certainly worth reading.

The second, which is also fascinating, is a response by Gregory Wolfe in The Wall Street Journal.

Though both authors make valuable points, they also both focus on Anglophone (and mainly American) literature. That's fine up to a point but, I would argue, the picture looks very different if you widen the lens: Torgny Lindgren, Kyung Sook-Shin, Roger Bichelberger, Fan Wen, Uwem Akpan, Martin Mosebach ...

And that's just a few of the Catholics.