Deep faith …

… Tolkien and Theology ~ The Imaginative Conservative. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The Lord of the Rings, he noted in 1953 to a Jesuit friend, “is of course a fundamentally religious and Catholic work” with the “religious element [ ] absorbed into the story and the symbolism.”[2] All his attempts at beauty, he admitted, came from his own understanding and love of the Blessed Virgin Mary as well as from his own mother, whom he considered a martyr and a saint.[3]Toward the end of his life, he wrestled with theological and philosophical issues in his larger mythology. He was concerned, especially, with the nature of the Fall, the possibility of the Incarnation, and the afterlife of his creatures within his own legendarium. These questions intrigued and consumed him as much as did the narrative of The Silmarillion.