Tolkien, Lewis, and the Gathering Storm, with Joseph Loconte in Nashville, TN

It’s often said that we live in cynical times where trust has grown thin. Concerns about character are considered suspect or sanctimonious, and calculations of power are taken to be the truest measure of reality. But our guest tonight thinks differently. Rather than succumbing to cynicism, he invites us to recover something essential. The power of moral imagination. In his latest book, The War for Middle Earth, he takes us into one of the most consequential friendships of the 20th century, that of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, and shows how their lives, forged in the shadow of two world wars, gave rise to stories that continue to shape our understanding of good and evil, Courage and sacrifice, heroism and cowardice. Despair and hope. He reminds us that these works and stories were not escapist fantasies, but acts of both resistance and renewal efforts to confront the rising tides of totalitarianism, nihilism and moral confusion with a vision of truth, beauty and goodness. What made Lewis and Tolkien’s epic stories so compelling and so timely is that they suggested the great battle of any age are not only political and economic, but spiritual and imaginative. Much of what builds a nation and defines a people are not just resources or military might, but what we love, what we long for, what kind of story we think that we’re living in.

It’s a fascinating bit of history, as well as an inspiring tale of friendship, and it’s hard to imagine someone who can tell this story with more energy, enthusiasm, or elan than our guest tonight, Joe Loconte. Joe is an author, a scholar, a historian, and a filmmaker. He serves as the director of the Rivendell Center in New York City, as well as the C.S. Lewis Scholar for Public Life at Grove City College. He is also, I am very proud to say, a senior Fellow of the Trinity For as well as a popular lecturer on Lewis and Tolkien, and a remarkably prolific author. He’s written for a variety of publications, including the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, National Affairs, The New Criterion, National Geographic, and I could go on. And as the author of several books, including the New York Times bestseller work A Hobbit, A Wardrobe and a Great War, which we got to hear from him here at MBA about a dozen or so years ago. And his newest work, The War for Middle Earth, which we’ve invited him here today to discuss. After Joe gives his remarks. Saint Paul Academy headmaster Will Norton will ask the first question, and then he’ll moderate questions from the audience. Joe, welcome.

You know, I love being back in Nashville after about ten years. Great being here with the Trinity Forum. Thank you all for coming. I had to get to the Johnny Cash Museum. Who’s been to the Johnny Cash Museum? Anybody? Yeah. And there’s one thing I have in common with Johnny Cash. Just one thing. When I lose my voice, which does happen occasionally when the voice comes back, the first 30 minutes or so. I have the voice of Johnny Cash. I am the man in black. All right, let’s get into it. The First World War is credited with ushering in the modern world, and with it the belief that the concepts of beauty, virtue, heroism, and truth were dead. Assumptions about the moral life. About the existence of good and evil seem to have vanished into the killing fields of the 1914 1918 war. By the end of that war, the emotional and spiritual lives of millions of ordinary Europeans were caught up in what you might call a no man’s land of doubt and disillusionment. The war unleashed a storm of murderous ideologies fascism, Nazism, communism, totalitarianism. Right? Think about it. The terrible result is going to be a second World War, the most devastating war in human history, and two of the most influential authors of the 20th century, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. They are caught up in the storm and the steel of both of these conflicts. Both men had fought as British soldiers in the trenches in France during the First World War.

Barely 20 years later, they have to endure a second global conflict. We cannot begin to understand their astonishing achievements as authors until we enter into their world friends. A world in crisis. And the moment we do this, we begin to see how the long shadows cast by the Second World War invaded their minds and their imaginations. We begin to see that much of what they wrote and taught was a deliberate rebuke. Yes, a rebuke to the ideologies that were degrading the dignity of the human person. Think about it. The substitute religions of their day modernism, scientism, socialism, communism, totalitarianism. I can put my thesis in three words war, friendship and imagination. It’s the tragedy of war that brought these two men together in friendship, and it’s their remarkable friendship that makes possible the creation of their great epic works. That’s the big picture. Now let’s unpack it. And I may be drinking a little bit more of this than usual. Go back to 1933. February. February 9th. We’re in the Oxford Union where a debate is being held. A motion is put forward for a vote. This House will under no circumstances fight for king and country. Let that line hang in the air. The motion is approved by a vote of 275 to 153. Now, what do we make of this? What do we make of this? This house on the. No circumstances fight for king and country.

Never in the long history of Great Britain had a generation of future leaders, among the best educated in Europe, publicly renounced any obligation to defend their nation in wartime, and their timing could not have been worse. It could be argued that 1933 is the year in which the liberal democratic project of the West begins to unravel. It’s the year when Woodrow Wilson’s dream of a new world order, based on the brotherhood of Man starts to dissolve when naked aggression goes unchallenged, when mass murder is committed with impunity. When Franklin Roosevelt arrives in 1933 in office there as president, the United States is in the throes of the Great Depression. Right? FDR promises to solve the nation’s economic woes, proclaiming the only thing we have to fear is fear itself, he says. Friends, there are all the things to fear in 1933. There is militarism in Asia. Japan, under the leadership of the supposedly divine emperor, Hirohito is waging a brutal war of aggression against China. In the communist Soviet Union, there is mass starvation and political violence. Stalin’s policy of collectivization has created a famine of biblical proportions, and we’re hearing that word collectivization again from the mayor of New York. Let’s see how that turns out. Right? Collectivization. By the spring of 1933, at least 5 million people are dead in the Soviet Union, millions more on the brink of starvation. In Italy, there’s Benito Mussolini, the fascist dictator swept into power in the 1922, determined to restore Italian greatness on the world stage.

By 1933, Mussolini is secretly drawing up plans to invade Ethiopia, making it a colonial possession. And then there’s Nazi Germany, January 30th, 1933, barely ten days before that Oxford Union Society vote. Adolf Hitler is elevated to chancellor, making him the second most powerful person in the country. Two days later, he dissolves the parliament. So the German government is led by a man who had announced his intention to tear up the Treaty of Versailles. Rebuild the military. Pursue a policy of territorial expansion. What’s the point of that? The point is, it’s at this very moment in 1933, the start of this unprecedented assault on the moral norms of Western civilization that J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis engage their literary talents to try to hold the line, hold the line. And in this endeavor, friends, they draw from deep wells, the collective wisdom of the literary canon of the West. Think. Homer. Virgil. Dante. Milton. Now, we don’t know exactly when Tolkien started writing The Hobbit, but he completes the first draft in early 1933. The Hobbit has been described as a book about entering manhood, but maybe in the end it’s about much more than that. Think about it the hero in the story leaves the safety of his hobbit hole to confront genuine evil. He puts his own life at risk to help his friends, resisting the powerful temptation to slip away to safety and return home the First World War.

Remember that First World War produced a generation of writers disenchanted with the concepts of courage and sacrifice. Think of works like Farewell to Arms, Goodbye to All That, All Quiet on the Western Front, many writers have become consumed by the idea of lost innocence the Hobbit friends, The Hobbit is the beginning of Tolkien’s reply. They shall not have the last word. C.s. Lewis is engaged in his own literary counterattack. 1933 he publishes a spiritual autobiography. He’s become a Christian now. He exposes the ideologies that were all the rage during his years as an atheist. The book is modeled on Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress. Lewis calls his book The Pilgrim’s Regress because his pilgrim has to unlearn many of the assumptions of his age. Lewis takes on Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx and Benito Mussolini. He skewers the modernist movement in literature and the arts, which had embedded itself in the leading cultural institutions modernism. In just two sentences, guy’s modernism rejects the idea that there’s a moral or spiritual purpose to all mortal lives. The emphasis in modernism is on the absurd, the nonsensical, the irrational. Think T.S. Eliot, the wasteland. Louis Marx, the literary and artistic set whom he calls the Clevers, the Clevers. They’re just so clever, explains a young, clever. We lost our ideals when there was a war in this country. They were ground out of us in the mud and the flood and the blood. There is no better line to describe the modernist mood, cynicism, moral cynicism.

J.r.r. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis deeply resent this outlook, and they conspire to do something about it. Probably at the end of 1936, they make a literary pact between them. Literary pact. Lewis had a nickname for Tolkien. His nickname was toddlers P o l l e r as toddlers. And he says this to Tolkien, turns to him in 1936, he says. Toddlers. There’s too little what we really like in stories. I’m afraid we shall have to try and write some ourselves. It is agreed. Tolkien will write a story on time travel. Lewis will write a story based on space travel. Both of their stories must point away to the great story. God’s rescue mission for mankind. Now, these are Oxford Dons, right? Professors? They’re not political figures. What do they hope to accomplish? Friends, whatever their objectives, we can’t forget that Tolkien and Lewis. They’re Englishmen, Englishmen, and they cared deeply about their country and its civilization. They know there are threats around. They resent the cynical outlook that’s in vogue. They must have concluded that the literary establishment could not be counted on to pierce through the fog. Britain’s national life, its culture, its politics Desperately needs moral clarity, so the two friends decide to do something about it. So what do they do? Token begins, but never finishes his time travel story. But in 1937, he publishes The Hobbit. Almost immediately, he begins writing the sequel, the Lord of the rings and Friends, with this epic story token will almost single handedly retrieve the concept of the mythic hero and reinvent him for the modern mind.

C.s. Lewis fulfills his part of the literary bargain. In 1938, he publishes out of the Silent Planet, the first book in the space trilogy. It is a story involving a trio of Earthlings who travel to another planet, Malacandra Mars, where they encounter three different species of rational creatures, all living together in perfect harmony. The story’s protagonist is a guy named Elwin Ransom. Elwin Ransom, a Cambridge professor clearly modeled on his friend Tolkien. Well. Ransom must battle two other travelers Dick Devine, a profiteer, and Doctor Weston. Weston, the mad scientist hell bent on colonizing other planets. And they meet the Oyarsa. The Oyarsa is the planet’s ruling intelligence, and the Oyarsa asks Ransom why he and his companions have come to us. Planet. What are you doing here? Right. One man is motivated by greed, Ransom says, but the other by a much darker force. And here’s how Lewis puts it in his story about Weston. I think he, doctor Weston would destroy all your people to make room for our people. And then he would do the same with other worlds again. He wants our race to last forever, I think, and hopes they will leap from world to world. Weston would destroy one race to make room for his own friends. What does that sound like? It sounds like the apocalyptic nightmare that is happening on Britain’s doorstep.

Lewis doesn’t have to invent it in Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The elimination of the Jews from Europe is essential for Germany’s attainment of living space for the Aryan race, and by 1938, Hitler’s assault on the Jewish people. This is the central fact of his domestic policy. Well, talking to Lewis imbue their stories with a deeply religious quality, right. The biblical doctrine of the fall. Lewis is more explicit about this, but both authors convey the idea of a cosmic struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. So it comes as something of a shock to C.S. Lewis that most of the reviewers of his first book in the space trilogy, they failed to notice the religious concepts at the center of the story. These are very literate people, reviewers. They don’t get it. And Lewis writes about this in a letter to his friend, Sister Penelope. Listen to these lines, friends. You will be both grieved and amused to learn that out of about 60 reviews, only two showed any knowledge that my idea of the bent one, Weston, the bent one, was anything but a private invention of my own. And then he says this if there is just someone with a richer talent and more leisure. I believe this great ignorance might be a help to the evangelization of England. Any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance, without their knowing it.

It’s a turning point for him. And you can’t overstate the importance of the turning point for Lewis. He realizes for the first time the potential of great storytelling to recover the core teachings of the Bible in a deeply secular culture. And think about it, friends. This realization occurs at the very moment when the political regimes rejecting the God of the Bible and embodying radical evil. They occupy the world stage. It is not a coincidence. Great Britain is at the storm front of this evil. Well, the survival of Great Britain is cast into doubt, isn’t it, friends? September 1st, 1939, when Germany invaded Poland, triggering the Second World War, the Polish people become the first of many victims of the blitzkrieg, the Lightning War, two weeks after Britain’s declaration of war. J.r.r. Tolkien writes to his publisher to explain why he doesn’t expect to make much more progress on his new story about hobbits. here’s what he said to his publisher. Any far reaching work of my own is out of the question, for I am liable to be summoned to a job undertaken last spring at any moment and have no idea what time, if any, outside of it, I shall have. What job is he talking about? The job he’s talking about is that of codebreaker for the British Foreign Office at Bletchley Park. He gets several days of training, but in the end they won’t need his skills.

But they need guys with good language skills. So they want the token, right? Oxford now faces the possibility of massive bombing raids, food shortages, the likelihood of a land invasion. They’re all expecting the Nazis to invade. So the government begins evacuating mothers and children from London and other cities to the English countryside to escape the anticipated bombing campaign. Nearly 3 million people are evacuated during the first few days of the exodus. 12 year old Lillian Henson, an evacuee from London separated from her parents, captures the moment with a few lines of poetry listen to Lillian a Saturday. There was never before when all mothers, rich and poor, stood and wept when their children went away on that great evacuation day. Well, for children, all girls appear at C.S. Lewis’s home in Oxford the day after the Nazi invasion of Poland. Here’s what Lewis said. He wrote to his friend about it. I’m a bachelor, he says. I never appreciated children until the war brought them to me. Patricia Heidelberger was one of those girls, and here’s what she said when she first met Lewis. My first impression of C.S. Lewis was that of a shabbily clad, rather portly gentleman, whom I took to be the gardener, and told him so. He roared. He boomed with laughter. Well, Lewis is going to stir an intellectual awakening in the young people who come into his home. Friends. He’s helping them with their homework. He’s helping them write their papers.

And you like to see us, Lewis, to help you write a paper over AI. Can I get a vote on that? But their presence transforms him as well. Transforms him as well, from a confirmed bachelor who doesn’t enjoy the company of children, to the author of one of the most beloved series of children’s books in modern fiction, The Chronicles of Narnia. Friends, war is the spark that likes the flame of imagination. It is probably at this time in 1939, after children. Evacuees now are a fixture in the Lewis home when Lewis scribbles the opening lines of the first book of the series, The Chronicles of Narnia. Here’s the first opening lines. This book is about four children. They all had to go away from London suddenly because of the air raids. They were sent to stay with a very old professor who lived by himself in the country. Think about it. In The Lion, the witch and the wardrobe, the Pevensie children flee the terrors of a world at war, only to enter Narnia. Narnia friends were. Another. War is being waged between Aslan and the forces of the White Witch. Well, Britain is not winning. It is not winning its war against Germany. When 300,000 British, French and Belgian troops are pinned down at Dunkirk in northern France, waiting to be annihilated by the German army. Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister, is given an offer to negotiate with Hitler, make peace. By this time, friends, in the summer of 1940, virtually all of Europe is in Nazi hands.

The military situation is desperate. The peace plan with Hitler brings to mind a scene in the Lord of the rings. Saruman’s offer to Gandalf the Wizard to join the forces of Sauron. Listen to that line from the Lord of the rings. A new power is arising. Against it. The old allies and policy will not avail us. Sauron says, come over to the Dark side. Well, Churchill tells his cabinet that he considered carefully whether he should enter into negotiations with Hitler. And here’s what he tells them. I am convinced that every man of you would rise up and tear me down from my place if I were for one moment to contemplate parley or surrender, he says. If this Long Island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each one of us lies. Choking in his own blood upon the ground. Friends, that’s leadership. That’s leadership. The Prime Minister’s determination to resist Nazism at all costs echoed in every major speech he delivered during the war as a transformative effect on the British people. But I believe it can also be discerned in the pages of the Lord of the rings. Remember the battle of Pelennor fields. The armies of Mordor are massing to destroy the forces of Gondor and Rohan. But the leader of the armies of Rohan is unyielding. Here’s how Tolkien put it. Stern now was Ilmaz mood.

He let blow the horns to rally all men to his banner that could come hither. For he thought to make a great shield wall at the last. And stand and fight, fight there on foot till all fell. And do deeds of song on the fields of Pelennor. When Frodo and Sam journey into Mordor, and their attempt to destroy the Ring of Power there, exhausted, nearly overwhelmed by the black skies and the painful fumes as Frodo casts himself upon the ground, Sam resolves his internal debate about what he must do. Here’s how Tolkien put it. He knew all the arguments of despair and would not listen to them. He says his will was set and only death would break it. This is the spirit, friends. This is the spirit of the British people in the summer of 1940, as they prepare for the Battle of Britain. Think of those 18 and 19 year old boys climbing in their Spitfires to take on the German Luftwaffe. Think of the residents of London throughout the Nazi blitz 76 consecutive nights. Save one of air raids against the City of London, and each day the citizens of London go back to work. London can take. It is their motto. But what if they made a deal with Hitler? What if they made a deal? The British people, once considered lazy and decadent by their enemies, resisted to the end. They held on, as Gandalf once described the hobbits, soft as butter.

They can be. Yet sometimes as tough as old tree roots. So think about what they’re up against. Think about what they’re up against. Everything. Hitler has promised the German people has come true. Everything. After the defeat of France, the German people are ready to follow him anywhere. Hitler’s speech to the Reichstag, July 19th, 1940. Broadcast around the world, it evokes the hatreds, the triumphalism of the Nazi movement. Cs Lewis is with his physician Doctor Harvard that day, and they’re listening to the speech when it comes over the BBC and it’s simultaneously translated into English. They listen to it together and it has an almost hypnotic effect. Lewis writes about it to his brother. I don’t know if I’m weaker than other people, but while the speech lasts, it is impossible not to waver just a little. This is C.S. Lewis. This is not a simpleton. While the speech lasts, it’s impossible not to waver just a little. He hears the speech on a Friday. Sunday, while attending Holy Trinity Church. While listening to the sermon. Lewis starts thinking about the devil. I don’t know how bad that sermon was, but he’s thinking about the devil. He gets the idea for a diabolical satire. He calls his book The Screwtape Letters Friends, The Screwtape Letters. It exposes the roots of the totalitarian temptation. Well, Britain is alone in 1940, and it looks like 1941 might be the year of collapse. Tolkien suggests as much in a letter in January 1941 to his son Michael, serving as an anti-aircraft gunner in the British military.

Think about that as a father gentleman out here. You fought in the First World War, and now you have a son fighting in the Second World War. Here’s what he wrote to Michael. Plain reasoning seems to show that Hitler must attack this country direct and very heavily soon before the summer. Writing again to Michael March 1941, he admits that his son’s fear that he might not survive the war is not unfounded. Here’s what he said. None of us may survive, not even Priscilla, his youngest, his daughter. I often have a sudden, horrible fear that we shall all perish. And then he goes on to write this to his son. He recalls the dread that engulfed him as he left as a soldier for the Western Front in 1916. Here’s what he wrote to Michael. I never expected to survive. And the intense emotion of regret. The vivid perception of the young man who feels himself doomed to die before he has set his word is with me still. A cloud, a patch of sun, a star, or often more than I could bear. Friends, this is life in England in 1941, the destitute year. And things get even worse. December 7th, 1941 Japan bombs Pearl Harbor and a surprise attack on the United States, crippling the Navy, killing more than 3200 soldiers and civilians. On the same day, Japan attacks the British outpost of Malaya, sinking the British battleship the Prince of Wales, killing 840 soldiers.

They’re gone. Hong Kong falls on Christmas Day with reports of rape and the massacre of many civilians. Japan is now at war with America and Great Britain. Germany declares war on the United States, forms a military alliance with Japan and Italy. It is now a global conflict. In December of 1941, Tolkien’s daughter, Priscilla. She receives a letter from Father Christmas. Father Christmas. Tolkien began writing and illustrating his father Christmas letters to his children when they’re just toddlers. The letters were usually filled with the escapades of the polar bear, the chief assistant to Father Christmas, whose comical misadventures affect the annual Christmas stock. A lot of whimsy. Write the Christmas letter of 1941, though there are goblins, goblins, friends and they’re on a rampage. Here’s what he writes in his letter to Priscilla. Father Christmas, I expect you remember that some years ago he had trouble with the goblins. We thought we’d settled it. Well, it broke out again. Worse than it’s been for centuries. Father Christmas notes that notion fewer children have written to him than in previous years. I expect it’s because of this horrible war, he says. So terribly many people have lost their homes or have left them. Half the world seems in the wrong place. Merry Christmas Priscilla. He will not feel his children from what’s happening in the world. He won’t write. Well. 1941 A director of the BBC, aware that many in his audience are struggling with the horrors of the war as C.S.

Lewis to deliver a series of talks explaining and defending the Christian faith. Yeah, I wasn’t making that up. The BBC, as C.S. Lewis, throw off a radio broadcast defending Christianity. How far they have fallen. Friends, right? He agrees. He travels by train from Oxford to London to record the talks. His opening line in the first broadcast for the BBC is this. Everyone has heard people quarreling. Everyone has heard people quarreling. What do we do when we quarrel? Friends, we appeal to a moral standard, a standard of right and wrong that we think the other guy has violated. Right? So for the next 15 minutes, from 745 to 8 p.m., this former atheist introduces the BBC audience to the concept of a universal moral law. That concept, if you think about it, it’s embedded in token story, isn’t it? Remember the exchange between Aragorn and Eomer in the Lord of the rings? They’re coming to grips with the growing threat of Mordor. I was a man to judge what to do in such times? Asks Eomer as he’s ever judged, says Aragorn. Good and evil have not changed since yesteryear, nor are they one thing among the elves and another among men. It is a man’s part to discern them. So at a moment in world history, when the moral foundations of Western civilization seem to be disintegrating, here are two authors trying to reverse the rot.

One of Lewis’s radio talks with the BBC is called The Invasion. The Christian faith, Lewis says, teaches that the struggle between light and darkness is not a war between equal and independent powers. Here’s what he says. It’s a civil war, a rebellion, and we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel enemy occupied territory. That is what this world is. And he goes on, Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say, landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. So here’s the question, friends, are we conducting our Christian lives? For those of us in the faith, are we conducting our Christian lives as if we really believed that we’re living in enemy occupied territory? Well, the BBC broadcast will be edited into a book, Mere Christianity. One of the most influential works of Christian apologetics ever written. And it’s written in wartime. In wartime? Well, by December 31st, Tolkien has taken his story to the breaking of the fellowship. When Boromir, one of the company, tries to take the ring from Frodo by force. And you guys know the story. The ring gives you the ability to make yourself invisible. Whoever possesses the One ring controls all the others. One ring to rule them all. One ring to find them. One ring to bring them all.

And in the darkness bind them. My precious. The ring of power. Friends. It’s the motive force behind Sauron’s attempt to enslave or destroy any living thing that stands in his way. Listen to Tolkien in the Lord of the rings. He brooked no freedom nor any rivalry, he says, and he named himself Lord of the earth. What does that sound like, friends? It sounds like a literary expression of a political ideology. Totalitarianism. This is the geopolitical reality, as Tolkien is composing his epic story. This is the outlook dominating the regimes in Tokyo, Berlin, Rome, Moscow. Tolkien began writing the Lord of the rings in 1937, nearly completed it before the Allied victory in 1945. He always insisted that his story about the fight for middle earth was not an allegory of the Second World War, but the geopolitical realities of these years the cult of the dictator, the utopian schemes to perfect humanity, the malevolent march of Nazism. These things could not have been kept out of the author’s mind. Just consider this as Saul on the dark Lord has acquired a fortress in the mountains from which to execute his evil designs. So, too did the Führer acquire a fortress at the Karlstein in the German Alps. The eagle’s nest. My power. My story is about power. Tolkien said power exerted for domination. So let’s think about it. The contagion of war, the lust for power, the existence of radical evil. The courage resisted required to resist it.

The catastrophic events of the war brought all of these concepts into focus in the Lord of the rings. Art is imitating life. Life is imitating art. You know, many of the young people, and I love discovering some of this in the research. Many of the young people who studied under Tolkien and Lewis during the war years. They later recalled the sense of living through a singular moment in their lives. Listen to Rachel Trickett, a student of Lewis. We made our way weakly through the blackouts to hear this extraordinary man. Pupils who survived the combat of his tutorials learned to love and rely on his humanity and loyalty and stealthy generosity. He would tell students the ones staying with him go to Blackwells bookstore, buy a book, put it on my tab, write Helen. Helen Wheeler attended lectures by Tolkien, was a pupil of Lewis during the war. Now war news, as you can imagine, was wrenching but unavoidable. But listen to Helen Wheeler. But a few times can there have been such splendidly exciting lectures and such overflowing lecture halls. What it meant for my generation of English language and literature undergraduate, she says, was that what happened in the great books was of equal significance to what happened in life? Indeed, they were the same. What happened in the great books was of equal significance to what happened in life. What a remarkable insight from this young woman. Tolkien and Lewis have helped a generation to understand that the truths expressed in the great books, the old books were deeply relevant to the events of the modern world, a world at war.

So as we bring this to a close, think about this. From 1939 to 1945, it really seemed that the forces of barbarism would prevail. It really looked friends. It really looked as if the survival of England depended upon the choices of quite small people who overcame their fears and fought the terror from the skies. And in the shadow of this reality, J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. They formed the nucleus of a small group of like minded authors and friends who met weekly to share and discuss their works in progress. They call themselves the inklings, right, the inklings, and together they create a beachhead that’s a good word for it a beachhead of resistance, a defiant no to the forces of disintegration that were threatening the civilized world. It would never have happened if these two remarkable authors had not met and become friends. You know, in his book The Four Laws, C.S. Lewis wrote that every true friendship is a kind of secession, even a rebellion against the forces of darkness. The story of the friendship between Tolkien and Lewis. It’s an account of how two men help one another to emerge from his own private darkness and to climb back into the daylight. Walter Hooper, who served as personal secretary. He told me in an interview at the end of Lewis’s life, Walter Hooper is his personal secretary.

I interviewed Walter Hooper several years ago. He’s in his 80s. He passed away a few years ago. He tells me this story that Tolkien told him, that Tolkien himself was more interested in building up languages, creating languages, than in writing a sequel to The Hobbit. He didn’t want to write a sequel to The Hobbit, but C.S. Lewis changed his mind. And here’s what Tolkien said to Walter Hooper, who told it to me. He says, you know, C.S. Lewis was such a boy and he had to have a story. And that story, the Lord of the rings, was written to keep him quiet. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but at the very least, Ttyl. As Tolkien admitted without Lewis’s great Encouragement and demands for more of the story. Give me more toddlers. Give me more. You can do better. He never would have finished it. When he finally does. Not long after the Second World War, Tolkien sends the manuscript to his friend. Here’s what C.S. Lewis wrote to him in a letter after he’d read it. I have drained the rich cup and satisfied a long thirst. And then he goes on. So much of your whole life. So much of our joint life. So much of the war, so much that seemed to be slipping away without a trace into the past is now in a sort made permanent. Do we even grasp what he’s saying? I think what he’s saying is that through the use of his imagination, Tolkien has captured something of their common life’s journey together with all of its joys and sorrows, friends.

And it’s hidden. It’s hidden in the pages of his epic story. This is what friendship can do. This is what friendship can achieve. When it reaches for a high purpose and it’s watered by the streams of sacrifice and loyalty and love that J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis could create stories of such radiance and beauty. When the world around them was so dark and disfigured, seems itself a mystery of grace. They knew friends. They knew what it was like to live in the land of shadow. And yet, like Sam Gamgee and Frodo Baggins on the threshold of Mordor, they pressed on through the darkness and they left for us a bright glimpse of the far off country. Here’s how Tolkien described it, and we’ll close with this. They’re peeping among the cloud rack high up in the mountains. Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while, and the beauty of it smote his heart as he looked up out on the forsaken land, and Hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold. The thought pierced him that in the end the shadow was only a small and passing thing. There was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach. Light and beauty beyond the walls of this world. May each of us find the courage and the grace and the faith to see it. Thank you for listening.

Well, thank you Joe. You’re starting to sound like Johnny Cash. We wonder if you might sing for us. that was wonderful. We appreciate your brilliance and the versatility of Joe. Talking to the fifth, sixth, and seventh graders to his very thoughtful remarks tonight. which just speaks of your great work, and we’re grateful for you. thank you to MBA and William for hosting this. Thanks always to Cherie for a wonderful night. We’re going to start our Q&A now. if you have a question, you can, where, Chris, where do you want him to come? get right there. Yeah, you can, you can line up right here. so as you’re, composing your thoughts, we do have a few guidelines. the, the three B’s of our guidelines. we need them to be civil. We need them to be brief and we need them to be a question. so those are the three guidelines, if you would abide by, I will start by posing the first question. I am curious in, in your, research of both Lewis and Tolkien, and seeing kind of their personal qualities, what are the personal qualities of each of them that inspired you the most that you would want to emulate, in your research? Yeah.

Terrific question. The qualities and there’s so many we could talk about. Let me start with Tolkien. Um. Boy, he, he just had this capacity to, in the midst of a, of a dark moment, dark moments in his life to hang on to what he knew was true about the best of the human person, the best of the human person made, made in the image of God. And so he wouldn’t let go of the idea that every person’s choices matter. The small little hobbit. Those choices matter. And that was not the mood of the hour. In the 1920s and 30s, he held on to the idea that we are caught up in a great story. We have great responsibilities to be on the right side of the forces of light and the forces of darkness, so that quality to hang on to truth in the teeth of such opposition. I just thought it was absolutely remarkable. But C.S. Lewis, there’s so many things you could say about Lewis, but I think the one thing I just talked about here was I’m still appreciating it was he didn’t really like the presence of children. He’s a bachelor and they come into his home, they invade his home and think about all the things he’s doing. Few teachers out there, he’s grading papers. He’s going to faculty meetings, right? He’s got to do high level research. He’s got to deliver lectures and prepare for those. He’s doing war work. You know, he’s a member of the Home Guard. And then these girls invade his home. The easiest thing to have done would be to just cart him off in there. Into their bedrooms. Keep them there. Have a little conversation with them instead. He literally opened up his heart to them and they transformed him. And that took a kind of humility and generosity of heart and spirit that I just lack. I’ll just say it here publicly now for the first time.

Hi, professor Loconte. Can you talk a little bit about how you were first introduced to Lewis and Tolkien and when in your life you first read their works?

Yes. Thank you for that. Yes. Thank you. Great to see you. I never read the, the, Chronicles of Narnia stuff until I was well into adulthood. I encountered C.S. Lewis when I became a Christian believer myself at the campus of the University of Illinois. I think I read a volume of essays, God in the Dock and then Mere Christianity, and then I’m hooked. A guy who was explaining his Christian faith and defending it in ways that no one I knew of was doing. So I was hooked on Lewis at the apologetic level, not his fiction. Tolkien. I didn’t start reading until I was in my 40s. I like to say I’m a late bloomer. And then my friends like to say, LeConte, you call this blooming? Really? This is blooming. so I’m in my 40s. The movies had come out, and I’m doing my doctoral work at Oxford on John Locke. I’m reading John Locke during the day, and I decide I need to start reading the Lord of the rings. I’m reading the Lord of the rings in a pub at night in London. It doesn’t get any better than that. And I will say this, contrary to those stories being escapist stories, just the opposite. Bess and others. When I was started pouring into the Lord of the rings, what I found was I was morally invigorated. I wanted to be a braver man, a more honest man, and to have more resilience. And I needed that for my doctoral dissertation at the time and other things. So it was the right time to jump into that book in my 40s. Thanks for that question.

Hi. Thank you so much. and recently rereading some of C.S. Lewis’s nonfiction, I’ve been struck by how well he seems to imagine the points of view that he disagrees with. And I think that’s one of the more winsome qualities that he brings to the conversation. And I don’t know that much about Tolkien from that angle, because I’ve mostly read fiction by him, I guess. But, I also am struck by how often C.S. Lewis puts himself in a camp with those that he might disagree with or understands how he used to think in a way that someone may think now. And I just wondered if you would say more about how you might have come across that in your research and how you think that might have the ability to do that imagining of like the other side might have influenced both of them writing these imaginative fictional accounts that we can all enter into?

Yes. Terrific question. How did both these men because they’re both they’re men of Christian faith talking with a Catholic Christian faith. Lewis, as an Anglican, a Protestant Christian. And Tolkien is more modest or more shy, if you will, about how he’s going to communicate Christian truth explicitly in his work. He’s careful about that. He’s introducing us to this moral universe, isn’t he? Where there is a good, there is an evil, and there’s a side you need to join. There’s a force looking over the Shire as he describes it. He gives these hints. So it seems that Tolkien wants to have this very broad appeal to people. And. And it seems to me he succeeds magnificently when we went into the theaters years ago, watching the films based on the books, pretty good rendition, you know, pretty good. And people are responding exactly the same way to the acts of heroism and sacrifice that you see in that story exactly the same way, no matter where they are on the spectr on the spiritual spectrum. So we had a magnificent ability to speak across the divides by appealing to what our highest aspirations moral beauty, moral beauty. Who doesn’t want to live in Rivendell, the land of the elves, right? It appeals to everyone. Lewis is more explicit, and it has something to do. I think with his own conversion experience, he knew what it was to not understand spiritual truth, to not know Jesus, and he knew what it was like to cross the other side. So you really do see how Lewis is learning as he goes in his career. Because his first book that I quoted tonight, The Pilgrim’s Regress, he really wrote it for like maybe 15 other people.

It wasn’t for a mass audience. It was like other scholars. There are so many scholarly references in it. He wasn’t trying to reach a broader audience. He didn’t know how. But then these opportunities come up and he’s being asked to do things. And his ability then kind of being that coerced but almost compelled to step into people’s worlds. So, for example, during the war, he’s asked by the chaplain at the British Royal Air Force come and talk to these young men before they climb into their Spitfires to go fight the Nazis. He’s not sure he wants to do it. He’s not sure he can talk to guys who had no college ambitions, necessarily. You know what I mean? But he goes and he writes of the first experience that he says failed miserably, failed miserably in that talk. But he stays with it. The chaplain encourages him, and he learns how to connect with these men at a deep level. And then think about, of course, mere Christianity. It’s not an accident that the first line of mere Christianity. It’s not about Jesus, is it? He will take the listener and the reader to Jesus in mere Christianity, but he can’t start there. He knows he has to start further back up the line. Everyone has heard people quarreling, so I think his understanding of the of the need to do that, it grew over time and it was kind of pulled out of him as opportunities came up to write and to speak. Great question.

Hi. Thank you so very much for coming. Loved the talk. I really loved how you tied in and with your book. I’m excited to read the book. Just all of the anecdotes and stories from their personal life and how that influenced them. I’m curious, what led you like what was the thing that led you to even start asking these questions about their life and inspired you to write the book. And then with that, how much how many of these stories did you know going in and which ones surprised you the most? Yeah.

Terrific question. I didn’t know most of these stories going in. I did not know most of them, especially the letters poring over their letters and getting some of that. you know, I’m, I never intended to write a book about Tolkien and Lewis, much less two books about Tolkien and Lewis. The first is about the first World War, the second about the Second World War. Never intended to write these books, but I’m an intellectual historian, and what intellectual historians do is they try to understand, important documents, write political documents, philosophical in their context, in their historical, cultural, political context, what’s going on in that person’s world when they’re writing, whatever it is, whether it’s Mein Kampf or John Locke’s second treatise, what are they thinking? What’s going on? And it occurred to me that all of the great biographies that are out there about Lewis and Tolkien, and there are wonderful biographies. I benefited from many of them, but I didn’t notice that the biographers were actually paying attention to the world in which they found themselves, which was a world in crisis. Their lives were bracketed by two world wars. Certainly those experiences had to affect their literary imagination. So the books were an attempt to figure out how that might have happened. So a lot of that, most of it I didn’t know going in, but I had an instinct, a hunch that there was something there. Great question. Thank you.

Much for your talk. I really enjoyed it. I noticed you mentioned in the beginning how C.S. Lewis’s writings were really made in response to prevalent Marxism and prevalent Marxism and freudianism. And I was just wondering, especially because elements of Marxism and Freudianism are becoming more popular today. What do you think it was that Lewis’s writing accomplished just the way he went about it, that was able to persuade people that those philosophies weren’t the most correct way to live and follow. And what we can learn from that in today’s pop culture, since they’re becoming more popular again. as you know, even in the face of Christian apologetics.

Yeah, that’s a terrific question. I’ll just take a stab at it because I’m in deep waters with that question. Are there any yes no questions out there in the audience? No. Terrific question. I have a question. Let’s think about this. What I’m going to maybe hit it on the side of it, but try to get at it what he’s doing. You know, I’ll see if I can find it quickly if I can. I’ll try to quote it from memory. he talks about the reasons about why he started writing children’s stories. Yeah, here’s what he says, why he adopted the whole idea of telling stories to try to introduce people to Christian truth. And this is part of what Lewis said. I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition, which had paralyzed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. The whole subject was like associated with lowered voices, almost a medical thing going on. And he says this. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency. Could one not thus steal past these watchful dragons? I thought I could. That is an astonishing kind of insight, it seems to me, in the power of story. to steal past the watchful dragons. So that’s part of the answer to the question.

It’s a huge question. How is he able to help people to reject the bad? You know, when you start reading The Chronicles of Narnia, you start figuring out who the bad characters are and you don’t want to be like them. He makes them unattractive, and Tolkien does the same. We talked about this with these wonderful young people today. I put up a slide of Gollum. We started talking about Gollum. And you know, what does Gollum represent? And at the end of the day, everybody agrees you don’t want to become Gollum. How do you become Gollum? By obsessing and desiring the ring, right? You become a Gollum. So by making evil unattractive through his literature, Tolkien and Lewis both, they are helping to inoculate people, I think, from the lies, inoculate them from the lies. That’s the one side of the coin. The other side of the coin, of course, which is the positive, is they’re helping to make goodness beautiful and attractive. That’s what George MacDonald did for CS Lewis when he was an atheist, and he picked up this work by George MacDonald Phantastes imbued with a Christian outlook. Lewis read it in 1916 on a train, and he said, I knew after a few hours I crossed a great frontier. What MacDonald helped Lewis to do, which is what Lewis has helped so many others to do, helping them to learn to love goodness. Now that’s a gift that I don’t have, but that’s a gift that he had. Like no one in his generation, no 1 in 100 years had. Terrific question. Took a stab at it. Yeah.

Thanks for your wonderful talk tonight. It was really great. what’s your take on this idea? As he wrote in the foreword to the second edition, I believe that, Tolkien rejected the interpretation of his stories as allegory, specifically allegory of World War two. Yeah. he was very explicit about that. Let’s you. I’m sure you’ve run across that. What’s your thoughts on that?

Yes. Great question. And, Tolkien did insist that his, his story about the ring was not an allegory either of World War two or of atomic power, because in the 1950s, when the book came out, a lot of people thought the ring was just a, you know, an allegory, a metaphor for the atomic bomb, atomic power. And he says this explicitly. Of course, my story is not about atomic power, but about power exerted for domination. So there’s that we have to say at the outset. But I think, and this is where I’m gently disagreeing with Tolkien, I’m gently disagreeing. I’m saying, wait a minute, J.R.R. Tolkien, you’re living in the midst of a cataclysm, and it doesn’t seem like Britain’s going to survive. And Britain is alone in the world alone. And there’s darkness all around you, and there’s malevolence on the world stage, the likes of which we have never seen, that can’t help but creep into the imagination of a man who is so. As sensitive as J.R.R. Tolkien was to these kinds of issues. So I think it crept in in different ways, not in an allegorical way. But I think there’s a reason that Sauron is so peculiarly malevolent. While Hitler is dominating the continent of Europe. I don’t think it’s an accident. And Tolkien actually says he admits this in a letter to one of his to his publisher, which I grabbed on to, of course, as evidence, he said, as he’s writing the Lord of the rings, he says, this is not a children’s story. It’s not like The Hobbit. And he says the darkness of the current days has had something to do with it. That’s all the proof I need. I’m off to the races. Great question. Thanks.

Thank you for being with us tonight. It’s an honor to hear you. What do you think of all the discussion in the last two years or so about metamodernism and transhumanism. Seems like that hideous strength had a prophetic quality to it. I’m curious if you think that Burke is going to be increasingly relevant in the years ahead, and if so, how and why?

Yeah, and that hideous strength. Very briefly, guys, the last of the space trilogy, I think he finished it by 1945. And the evil entity in The Hideous Strength. It’s this technocratic, pseudoscientific, malevolent force that wants to take over a college town. Shocking. It’s called the nice. The National Institutes for for coordinated experiments. The nice. Right? Very Orwellian. And I think it is a prophetic book. One of the things that you see is the abuse, not only the abuse of science, but a coercive state working in conjunction with perverted science to enslave a population. Is that starting to sound familiar? It’s 1945 and one of the things that’s happening, spoiler alert in that story, is that the evil mind, the unmanned Weston, is going to basically, what’s the word I want to use here? do a kind of information dump a life force dump to put himself into a machine, to download himself into a brain and he won’t need a body. What does that sound like? This is 1945. So what Lewis and Tolkien are both doing? Lewis is doing it very explicitly in that hideous strength. And throughout the space trilogy, he’s pushing it back against the dehumanization that is going on. Yes, on the world stage, but also in literature, because the modernist movement had become, you could really argue, almost anti-human. The idea that the human person has more worth, has a moral purpose, has moral agency, can make moral choices. It’s going out the window in the 1920s and 30s men and women are not writing. Authors are not writing books about great heroic quests and the chivalric code being reintroduced. That’s not what they’re writing is. All of that looks like nonsense to the postwar generation of World War One, so they’re pushing back against that dehumanization, especially in that hideous strength. We probably all should be rereading it as a warning. Yeah. Great. Great question. Yeah.

I would also like to offer you my thanks for being here. This has been wonderful. Earlier, you made a comment about their works being art imitating life, and I was just curious if you came across anything in there. You know, I would say most of us would probably say like they were artists, they made great art. But to them, was that ever a part of their identity, their goal, as they were telling these stories and try to point people to this higher story or they also thinking about making their both academics and have all sorts of other aspects of their lives? You know, on the surface, at least to me, it would seem like maybe they weren’t, but I was just curious if that was a part of their terrific question thinking.

Terrific question. On the one hand, they both want to write stories that are going to challenge these assumptions, these dark, gloomy, cynical assumptions of their age. Right? Toddlers. They’re not writing the books we want to read. We had to write them ourselves. That’s what they’re getting at, right? The literary pact. They want to push back. But friends, and this is good for all of us. They want to write magnificent stories. Moral beauty, moral excellence. They want stories that will captivate the imagination and you can’t put them down. So I think that’s part of the reason, of course, that they are meeting together every week during the war, during the war years, every Friday night in Lewis’s rooms, in Maudlin Eagle and Child pub, but particularly those evenings when they’re reading each other their unfinished manuscripts. They read a portion out loud and critique it. Imagine being in a room with Lewis, Tolkien, Charles Williams and the gang. And here’s your little essay to be critiqued, right? Pretty scary stuff, but that’s what they’re doing. Tolkien said that he read out loud to C.S. Lewis virtually every chapter of the Lord of the rings, and Lewis would respond in always in constructive ways. Sometimes Lewis would break down and weep, weep at a particular chapter, right? and Lewis would just keep telling Tolkien, give me more tollers, give me more. So they are trying to help each other to be the best writers they can be, to tell the most compelling stories they can tell. They don’t want to be propagandists, and I don’t think either of them were. I think and Lewis talks about this in one of his essays, what comes out in your stories is the soil of your own mind. It’s what’s in your heart. It’s what you’re grounded in, what you are rooted in. It either comes out naturally or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t come out naturally, then it will become propaganda and it’ll be a bad story. He’s very clear about this, and I think you could say for C.S. Lewis, as Walter Hooper described them, the most thoroughly converted man he’d ever met. He was thoroughly converted to Christ. His life was transformed from what it had been. And his faith in Christ is deep. It is solid, he is transformed, and it just naturally comes out of him in his stories. Terrific question. It’s a piece of an answer. Yeah.

This seems to be the best brains in Nashville in this room, which is kind of daunting. You said bringing essays to any of them was, daunting. Sitting at this very low microphone is a little daunting, but in the midst of the smallest people making the biggest difference, like you said, one of the things that struck me growing up with Narnia than growing up with The Hobbit, then growing up with the Lord of rings, and then growing up with Harry Potter, and then growing up and reading them all over again, is the difference that they made, not only in different stages of my life, but in different stages of the world. Yes. And you did mention that, one of the things I noticed most was that the difference between the Narnia and how clear it was, and then Lord of the rings and how hidden it was. But one of the things that I found spans over all of them and even leaks into Rowling’s works, which she was influenced by them as well. But is light in darkness? Yes. And it’s enough for me to have it tattooed in Elvish on my arm. I find that light and darkness can be seen in historical mindset from these books and what they went through. And you talk so much about the darkness of their lives and what they had to bring forth, but also in the spiritual realm and what we can all find. And you talked about him writing a couple books for about 14 people. I’ve tried to read those. I’m not the 14, but the other books that span that are written for everyone. The light, the light in the darkness seems to span through all of them. And I was wondering if you were also struck by that and what your own personal take was.

Yes, it’s a wonderful it’s a wonderful question. The light and darkness thing. Let me just take a stab at it, a couple of things to say. And let me focus on Tolkien here on this for a minute. When you think about the Lord of the rings and the quest, the amazing thing about this quest story, of course, friends is. That’s unlike any other quest story because. Typical quest stories is the man the woman. They’re out to grab something of great value. Recover something of great value that’s been lost. But in this quest story, the great dilemma is we have the ring and we can’t use it. We have to destroy it. It’s about what? Self-denial. This, this object of great power cannot be used because it will corrupt them beyond retrieval. And so it’s all about renunciation. Renunciation of self. During the Second World War, when powers on both sides are trying to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and Tolkien is writing a story about renunciation, humility. Right? C.S. Lewis is obviously doing the same thing in The Chronicles of Narnia and in the space trilogy. The hero, the protagonist has to forget. Self ransom has to forget self and decide without any hope of victory. He’s going to go against the unman against Weston because it’s what he needs to do. So there is this deep, profound sense that these men have.

There is a struggle going on between light and darkness. And what I love about them. I want to quote you from Tolkien, and we’ll close on this. Yes, they describe the struggle, but they make they make the light and the goodness so attractive, don’t they? You want to be with Aslan? You want to be on Gandalf’s side. No matter where you are spiritually, religiously, you want to be on their side. That’s a gift to make it so attractive and compelling. And let’s just think about how Tolkien described the land of Rivendell. He’s able to write these words during one of the darkest moments in human history, as he’s describing the kingdom of the elves. Let’s close with this. For a while, the hobbits continued to talk and think of the past journey and of the perils that lay ahead, but such was the virtue of the land of Rivendell that soon all fear and and anxiety was lifted from their minds. The future, good or ill, was not forgotten, but it ceased to have any power over the present. Health and hope grew strong in them, and they were content with each good day as it came. Taking pleasure in every meal and in every word and song. Now that’s a vision worth chasing. God bless you all. Thank you for coming. Thank you.

Good evening everyone. My name is Sam Funk and I am live here in Nashville and I’ve been involved with Trinity for about 20 years. I’ve been on the board for the last seven. And as you can imagine, Trinity is very near and dear to my heart, the heart of my wife and our family. Um. My job is to give thanks, ask you for your support, and then, of course, send you on your way. Let me start by thanking Jo. what a great presentation. What I love about Jo, and I’ve heard him speak so many times, is just the obvious enthusiasm for the subject matter. Okay. You do not doubt for one minute that Jo loves this subject matter. Okay? He loves what he’s talking about, and he’s so happy to share it with us. I just hope we don’t have to wait another ten years to get you back in Nashville. Jo. So you are always welcome here. and tonight’s event is a great example of what Trinity Forum is about. And if you know people that couldn’t be here tonight who would like to hear what Jo had to say or any of the other presentations we’ve had here in Nashville around the country, go to our YouTube page. This will be posted in a couple of days, but we’ve got all of our historical events there as well, and it’s all free of charge and it’s all available, so feel free to share that with others. for a deeper dive into some of the thoughts and thinkers we’ve discussed this evening, we recommend several of our readings. They’re for sale in the auditorium and one is spirit and the imagination, the Pardoner’s tale, God’s grandeur and revelation of divine love. We also recommend that you join the Trinity Forum Society on the cards that are in front of you. There’s a QR code. If you zap that, it’ll take you to Trinity Forum Society, and we’d love for you to join us in the work we’re doing. a subscription to that will get you a quarterly readings. our daily email, it’s a curated list of different articles of what we’re reading and a gift membership to share with others. And if you join this evening, we will give you a signed copy of Jo’s book, The War for Middle Earth. beyond the Trinity Forum Society, though, there are many other ways to support what we do, both in Nashville and throughout the country. Trinity exists of course, because of sponsorship and generosity of so many individuals, companies and foundations. So we would strongly encourage you if you enjoy what Trinity is doing, if you like what we stand for, please join us in our work. I’d be happy to talk to you. Give Thornton another national trustee any the Trinity Forum staff members here tonight. We would love to share with you more about what we’re up to and how you can come alongside us and support what we do. So as always, it’s appropriate to end with thanks. We want to thank tonight’s sponsors who are listed on the card. We also want to thank Elizabeth Bertini at MBA. Leila Scogin at Saint Paul’s and also our volunteers, Lindsay Necas, Ashley Larmer, and Amy Richardson. Again, thank you all for being here tonight and have a great evening. Thank you.