{"id":3543,"date":"2009-03-27T14:57:50","date_gmt":"2009-03-27T14:57:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2009\/03\/27\/tolkien-not-religious\/"},"modified":"2009-03-27T14:57:50","modified_gmt":"2009-03-27T14:57:50","slug":"tolkien-not-religious","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2009\/03\/27\/tolkien-not-religious\/","title":{"rendered":"Tolkien Not Religious?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Arts &amp; Letters Daily had a link to a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.city-journal.org\/2009\/19_1_urb-science-fiction.html\"><cite>City Journal<\/cite> article about religious symbolism in science fiction<\/a>, which attempts to claim that there has been a recent swing toward Christian symbolism in the genre (at least, in movie and television SF&#8211; the only books mentioned are forty-ish years old). There are a number of problems with it, but the most jarring has to be this paragraph:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>One reason that Disney finally made a movie out of C. S. Lewis&#8217;s Christian allegory <cite>The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe<\/cite> in 2005 may be that popular fantasy has become increasingly religious at heart. Peter Jackson&#8217;s brilliant film adaptations of J. R. R. Tolkien&#8217;s <cite>Lord of the Rings<\/cite> trilogy, on the other hand, probably don&#8217;t fall into the category of messianic fantasy, despite a quick episode in which the wizard Gandalf experiences a sort of death and rebirth; Tolkien&#8217;s chief inspiration was political, not religious, and Jackson remains faithful to that intention.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>Huh? Are you talking about the same books that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tor.com\/index.php?option=com_content&#038;view=blog&#038;id=13692\">Kate is re-reading<\/a>?<\/p>\n<p>I mean, it might be less overtly religious than <cite>The Lion, the With, and the Wardrobe<\/cite>, but that&#8217;s not a high bar to clear&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Arts &amp; Letters Daily had a link to a City Journal article about religious symbolism in science fiction, which attempts to claim that there has been a recent swing toward Christian symbolism in the genre (at least, in movie and television SF&#8211; the only books mentioned are forty-ish years old). There are a number of&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2009\/03\/27\/tolkien-not-religious\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Tolkien Not Religious?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,35,37,29,38],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-movies","category-pop_culture","category-sf","category-television","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3543\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}