Tolkien, Newman, Catholicism and Today’s “Airbrushing of Religion”

Tolkien, Newman, Catholicism and Today’s “Airbrushing of Religion”

In recent weeks, long lines streamed into the Morgan Library to see a display of J.R.R. Tolkien’s memorabilia and his art, mostly drawings and watercolors. Other authors like William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor sketched as an avocation, but these pictures were very much an integral part of Tolkien’s symbolic world in The Lord of the Rings, The…