UCLA & UC Santa Barbara

The Thomistic Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of California, Santa Barbara presents a lecture by Prof. Carol Zaleski of Smith College titled “C. S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien: Faith and Reason, Imagination and Fellowship in a World under Siege.”

About the lecture: C. S. Lewis, the great twentieth-century literary scholar and religious writer, and his fellow “Inkling,” the unsurpassed and unsurpassable mythopoeic artist J.R.R. Tolkien, were destined to live through the two world wars and the social upheavals of the twentieth century. Out of that trauma, and with the help of their fellowship, they forged works of imagination, beauty, reason, and Christian hope -- works which, as Professor Zaleski will suggest, have the power to reorient us as we try to cope with the current pandemic and the bitter conflicts of our own day.

This lecture will be delivered over Zoom. Register below to receive the Zoom credentials in your email inbox.

Wednesday, February 24

5:00 PM PST

About the Speaker:

Carol Zaleski is the Professor of World Religions at Smith College in Northampton Massachusetts, where she has been teaching philosophy of religion, world religions, religion and literature, and Catholic thought since 1989. She is the author of Otherworld Journeys: Accounts of NearDeath Experience in Medieval and Modern Times (Oxford University Press) and The Life of the World to Come: NearDeath Experience and Christian Hope (Oxford University Press); and she is coauthor with Philip Zaleski of Prayer: A History (Houghton Mifflin), The Book of Heaven (Oxford University Press), and The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).