Wisconsin Lutheran College Tolkien Lecture
Xoanon @ 12:59 pm EST

Altaira writes: Mike Foster, one of our ORC scholars passed this on to me to put on the front page:

Baylor University Professor Ralph Wood to give lecture on J.R.R. Tolkien at Wisconsin Lutheran College

MILWAUKEE – Baylor University Professor Ralph Wood presents "J.R.R. Tolkien: Writer for Our Time of Terror" on Friday, February 10 at 7:30 p.m. in the Black Box Studio Theatre at Wisconsin Lutheran College. The lecture is free and open to the public. The theatre is located in the college's Center for Arts and Performance at 8815 W. Wisconsin Ave. For more information regarding this event, contact Dr. Peter Fraser at (414) 443-8792.

"It's a dangerous business going out of your door," says Bilbo Baggins (of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings). "You step into the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." On September 11, 2001, more than three thousand Americans were swept to their deaths as a result of terrorist attacks. With uncanny prescience Tolkien predicted that ours would be a time of terror, evil striking us both from within and without. This lecture will be devoted to the naming of that terror, on the one hand, but also to identifying the hope which can enable us to live without panic and in the face of it.

Wood holds a Ph.D. from the Divinity School of the University of Chicago. In 1998, he was appointed as an interdisciplinary university professor of theology and literature, teaching in the departments of religion and English as well as the Truett Theological Seminary at Baylor University in Waco, Texas. Wood serves as editor-at-large for the Christian Century and as a member of the editorial board for the Flannery O'Connor Review. His Tolkien related works include The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-earth .

Wisconsin Lutheran College is a liberal arts college located on the west side of Milwaukee.