Lecture Series: Dr. Ralph Wood on "J.R.R. Tolkien: Writer for Our Time of Terror"

"There is only one Road," declares Bilbo Baggins, "and it's like a great river; its springs are at every doorstep, and every path is its tributary." "It's a dangerous business," he adds, "going out of your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to." On September 11, 2001, more than three thousand Americans were swept to their deaths as a result of terrorist attacks. With uncanny prescience, J.R.R. Tolkien predicted that ours would be a time of terror, with frightful forces of evil striking both from within and without. About Ralph Wood Ralph WoodRalph C. Wood, University Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, holds B.A. and M.A. degrees from Texas A&M University-Commerce, as well as M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Chicago. From 1971-97 he taught on the faculty of Wake Forest University, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, where he was the John Allen Easley Professor of Religion. At Baylor, he teaches in both the Great Texts program and the Department of Religion. He serves as an editor-at-large for the Christian Century and as a member of the editorial board of the Flannery O'Connor Review. His major book, first published in 1988 and still in print from the University of Notre Dame Press, is entitled The Comedy of Redemption: Christian Faith and Comic Vision in Four American Novelists (Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, John Updike, and Peter De Vries). He is also the author of Contending for the Faith: The Church's Engagement with Culture (Baylor, 2003); The Gospel According to Tolkien: Visions of the Kingdom in Middle-earth (Westminster John Knox, 2004); and Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Eerdmans, 2004).