Welcome to the Tomistic 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.

The title of this talk is truth, goodness, and fantasy literature.

The subtitle is twofold.

So the subtitle that I have here is more sort of descriptive, but less kind of eye-catching and attention-grabbing.

So the subtitle I'm giving you here is to mystic reflections on the rise of a sub-genre.

The alternative subtitle, which is really kind of the catalyst for why I wrote this talk

in the first place, is this?

Is J.R.R.R. Tolkien better than George R.R. Martin.

So George R. Martin is the author of the book series that gave rise to the HBO miniseries Game of Thrones, or HBO series

Game of Thrones.

So is Tolkien better than Martin, right?

Is Lord of the Rings better than Game of Thrones?

And so this was a question that was posed to me by a particularly tenacious student of

mine, and because he wouldn't give up

on this idea, I ended up writing this talk to just shut him up. And it turns out that it's a really

fun talk. And so my hope is that you'll see that so it's equal parts playful and also an opportunity to do some really rich and serious to mystic philosophy.

So that's what we're going to be doing.

So the plan for the talk is fairly simple.

First, I'm going to offer you some reflections on recent, this kind of

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