Welcome to the Timistic Institute podcast.

Our mission is to promote the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university, the church, and the wider public square.

The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

To learn more and to attend these events, visit us at to mystic institute.org.

J.R.R. Tolkien triumphed over a lonely mountain of suffering.

The chapters of his life ring out like an epic catalog,

the sad arc from South Africa to Birmingham, with his father's death defining

his early childhood, his mother's conversion to the Church of Rome, her diabetic martyrdom

and isolation from her Protestant family, the saving intervention of the errations and the charismatic

stamp left on them by two saints,

Philip Neri and John Henry Nugan.

The Oxford degree in English language and literature.

The delayed marriage to Edith Brat, the front line entrenched fever, the academic rise, the growing family, C.S. Lewis and the

inklings, the creation of Middle Earth, it is the stuff of legend. C.S. Lewis's life was also

marked by challenges. He lost his mother when he was nine. He also served at the front and faced the unspeakable horrors of machine guns and barbed wire.

Like Tolkien, he came to Oxford from a foreign country, though Ireland before the days of the

Republic was a British colony.

The two great men had been tested in ways that prompted fellow feeling and mutual understanding.

We may say that fate or providence prepared a common ground between them. They also shared a

cultural and literary inheritance. Both were born into the Protestant faith, though Tolkien, as a young boy, elected to follow

his mother's lead and convert to the Church of Rome.

When he went up to Exeter College, Oxford in 1911, he joined the small minority of Catholic

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