In this section of our website, we engage with artists of all types, especially storytellers. You can also enjoy these videos on our YouTube channel’s Arts and Theology playlist!

This is our 11 part video series exploring Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, with references to The Hobbit, The Silmarillion, and other books in the Legendarium. The story is a beautiful exploration of the character of God, the purposes of God described as a musical symphony where God wants apprentice musicians to learn and play their parts well, evil as dissonant music and redemption as musical reintegration, human being and human becoming, the addictive power of evil, the hero’s journey and the defeat of evil as atonement and salvation, the possibility of created beings to become divine light-bearers, ethics and epistemology, lessons on power and politics, and how pagan virtue points to Christian faith, hope, and love.

Tolkien wrote to create a story that contained the languages he studied and invented or reconstructed, to create a pre-Christian myth for England, and to suggest an explanation for why the historic Angles converted to Christian faith so quickly. So his story foreshadows Jesus. Click here or on the graphic to the right.

Stay tuned!

Stay tuned! A preliminary:

David Bates, Half Pint with Mako Nagasawa: Atonement and the Stone Table. Pints with Jack, May 13, 2023. A 35 minute video where Mako was a guest with David Bates. David and Mako focused especially on the death of Aslan the Lion in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. But we also engaged with The Magician’s Nephew and The Great Divorce. Mako suggested that Aslan’s death represented a medical substitutionary atonement. It was a short summary of his longer paper, C.S. Lewis’ Theology of Atonement.