Center for Romantic Theology and Spiritual Formation at Northwind

On Romantic Theology:

This is the first conference Malcolm has been invited to curate himself, so as to really set out the stall as to what he believes and has set out to defend in all his work, which is that the imagination is a truth bearing faculty and a vital means of intuiting and apprehending real truths about both the creation and the creator.

J. R. R. Tolkien believed in his friend C. S. Lewis so much that he nominated Lewis for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

When Lewis died, Tolkien wrote about “the unpayable debt” he owed him. The greatest of those debts, he said, was Lewis’s “sheer encouragement” over many years to keep writing.

“He was for long my only audience,” Tolkien explained. “Only from him did I ever get the idea that my ‘stuff’ could be more than a private hobby. But for his interest and unceasing eagerness for more, I should never have brought The Lord of the Rings to a conclusion. We owed each a great debt to the other, and that tie, with the deep affection that it begot, remained.”

Lewis spoke in similar terms about Tolkien and their circle of friends:

“What I owe them is incalculable,” he wrote. “Is any pleasure on earth as great as a circle of Christian friends by a good fire?”

Their friendship helped give birth to some of the most beloved books ever written, including The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia.

Together, those worlds of hobbits, lions, wardrobes, and wandering kings have sold hundreds of millions of copies worldwide. A reminder that sometimes, behind every great writer, there is a friend feeding the fire while the rest of the world sleeps. 📚🔥

As a Yale Divinity School grad who witnessed some of the marginalization of conservative Christians even back then, and as a professor who has fought student pressure to inflate grades and faculty tendencies to favor one ideology over others, I’m thankful that I now teach at Northwind—a deeply spiritual ecumenical seminary with roots in the Wesleyan Methodist tradition and branches in many traditions and perspectives. And a more fair and accountable grading system. We have a big enough tent at Northwind Theological Seminary to make most students feel heard and understood even when we disagree.

Desperately Seeking Alternatives to Arrogance - Christianity Today The Trump administration’s critique of elite universities is worthwhile, but government control is problematic. Good news: Christian study centers are multiplying at major universities.