Elves and Angels: Fantasy and the religious imagination? Professor Alison Milbank, University of Nottingham
Event details
St William of York Lecture
Why do the Harry Potter novels or Tolkien’s mythology so grip people? They give the sense of a world which you could go on exploring for ever: a world that has religious depth. We shall explore the role of fantasy in evoking a specifically religious sense in a deadened materialist world, but also look at how fantastic literature does not take us away from reality but restores it to us, enchanted.
About the speaker
Alison Milbank is Professor of Theology and Literature at the University of Nottingham and Canon Theologian at Southwell Minster. Her most recent book is God and the Gothic: Religion, Romance and Realism in the English Literary Tradition (Oxford University Press, 2018) and she has also written on the fantastic in Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real (Bloomsbury, 2007). She writes also on Christian Apologetics, as in 'Apologetics and the Imagination: Making Strange', in Imaginative Apologetics: Theology, Philosophy and the Catholic Tradition, ed. Andrew Davison (SCM, 2011).