ABSTRACTS
JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES
Vol. XXXVIII 2026
C. S. LEWIS & J. R. R. T OLKIEN:
THE PROMISE OF
CHRISTIAN FAIRYTALES
JIS XXXVIII 2026: 1-14
TRANSCENDENCE IN
CHRISTIAN FAIRYTALES (Editorial)
Oskar Gruenwald
Institute for Interdisciplinary Research
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Christian fairytales engage a reader’s imagination via plots and characters that one can identify with. As this 38th JIS thematic volume attests, fairytales are part of the larger genre of storytelling unique to the human species. Children are naturally drawn to fairytales that offer fantastic tales, heroes and villains, and mesmerizing plots that have a positive resolution or a happy ending. But what characterizes Christian fairytales is the overarching quest for transcendence. Christian fairytales offer imaginative pathways to mold character as they seek the cardinal virtues of beauty, truth and goodness. These transcendentals are the central axis of Christian fairytales that point beyond themselves to a Creator. Both C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien were master storytellers able to transport readers into fairyland exploring heroic quests, conquests, and self-conquest. Christian fairytales thus offer a marvelous venue to engage the classical paideia of building character anchored in a universe destined for transcendence.
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JIS XXXVIII 2026: 15-34
FAIRYTALES AGAINST THE MACHINE:
C. S. LEWIS, J. R. R. TOLKIEN
AND BODILY SALVATION
Dawn Lewis Sutherland
Liberty University
___________________________________Transhumanist proposals advance a technological soteriology in which salvation is imagined as uploaded consciousness rather than bodily resurrection. This essay traces the prehistory of that vision from Gnostic contempt for matter, through Cartesian dualism, behaviorism, and cybernetics, to contemporary accounts, and argues that such projects erode the Christian grammar of salvation by reducing the imago Dei to informational continuity and relocating hope from the incarnate, crucified, and risen Christ to digital persistence. The essay offers a literary-theological reading of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Lewis’s ghosts and “solid people,” Eustace’s un-dragoning, and the “deeper country” of the new Narnia, together with Tolkien’s Istari, Númenor, Frodo, Aragorn, and the Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth, reveal a convergent anthropology in which glory intensifies embodiment rather than abolishing it. Thus, Christian fairytales function as counter-liturgies that retrain the moral imagination to receive creation as gift and to desire resurrected life in a renewed world. This salvation, given through the incarnate, crucified, and risen Christ and embodied in a restored creation, offers a hope uniquely sufficient to resist posthuman visions in an age of technological disenchantment.
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JIS XXXVIII 2026: 35-54
THE SACRED SIGNS OF FANTASY:
J. R. R. TOLKIEN AND THE SIGNIFICANCE
OF FAIRY - TALES
Charles E. DeBoard
St. Charles Community College
___________________________________This essay examines the moral significance of fairy-tales in light of J. R. R. Tolkien’s romanticism. Tolkien’s fictional works exemplify the theory of mind, language, and myth developed in his essay, “On Fairy-Stories.” Tolkien’s theory is in turn reminiscent of the Romantic philosophy of G. F. P. von Hardenberg (Novalis). A crucial similarity between the two views concerns the constitutive relation of language to thought: if word forms mind, then the latter might be reformed through the telling of tales. This essay considers the philosophical grounds for such a view. It addresses G. W. F. Hegel’s criticism of Novalis and investigates whether a Tolkienian view is vulnerable to Hegel’s argument that romantic irony collapses into solipsistic detachment. Tolkien’s peculiar teleological rationalism complicates the answer to this question. The significance and value of fairy-tales is, on Tolkien’s account, symbolic in a quasi-sacramental fashion.
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JIS XXXVIII 2026: 55-74
THE PROMISE OF TRANSFORMATION
IN THE FAIRY STORIES
OF J. R. R. TOLKIEN AND C. S. LEWIS
Cambry G. Pardee
Pepperdine University-London, UK
___________________________________Fairy stories promise transformation. Against the backdrop of postmodernity, where value systems are relative and subjective, good fairy tales uphold a vision of the transcendentals of truth, beauty, and goodness, with a path toward these ends. The transformative power of Fairyland is a central theme in the fairy stories of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis. Tolkien’s two engaging images of transformation are the journey and the seed. While the external circumstances of the journey produce changes in a person, such changes are dictated by patterns hidden within, like growth patterns inside a seed. In Lewis, the deterioration of a person’s character often proceeds from within, while positive transformation usually requires external assistance. Similarly, both Tolkien and Lewis understood that fairy stories transform readers who imaginatively enter Fairyland, undergo change, and return to the real world transformed. Finally, the sort of transformation produced by travel in Fairyland, and reproduced by fairy stories, is mirrored by the total renovation of a person that is the promise and the task of the Christian life.
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JIS XXXVIII 2026: 75-94
EXCURSIONS INTO ENCHANTMENT:
EUCATASTROPHE IN NICK JOAQUIN’S POP STORIES
Juliana Maria Odoño
University of Asia and the Pacific, Philippines
___________________________________This essay analyzes two of Nick Joaquin’s stories from his 1979 children’s series, Pop Stories for Groovy Kids, through the lens of J. R. R. Tolkien’s 1947 essay, “On Fairy-Stories.” It examines how the first three uses/ functions of fairy stories–Fantasy, Escape, and Recovery–are developed, how they interrelate, and how they contribute to the highest function, Consolation, and each story’s eucatastrophe. It considers also how these interrelations shape the stories’ value for readers. The analysis reveals a dynamic interplay among the first three uses/functions, which collectively build toward Consolation and the eucatastrophic moment. These uses/ functions render the stories more meaningful, engaging, and rooted in the Filipino context. The eucatastrophe in these tales may be either straight-forward or nuanced, suggesting the need for a broader category that synthesizes the gems within Tolkien’s framework with Joaquin’s “Tropical Gothic.” Ultimately, Joaquin’s stories offer readers of all ages opportunities for insight, re-enchantment, and cultural reflection, while pointing also to the adaptability and universality of Tolkien’s ideas.
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JIS XXXVIII 2026: 95-108
CHAOS CONTAINED:
IMAGINATION, SUFFERING, AND MORAL MEANING
IN C. S. LEWIS AND J. R. R. TOLKIEN
Andy T. Chang
Liberty University
___________________________________Late modern culture frequently experiences suffering not merely as pain but as a collapse of meaning. Therapeutic and nihilistic responses often attempt either to reduce suffering to psychological mechanisms or to accept chaos as the final truth about reality. This essay argues that C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien offer an alternative through their understanding of imagination and fairy-story. Rather than resolving evil through philosophical explanation, their narratives situate suffering within morally coherent worlds oriented toward transcendence. Lewis’s reflections on imagination and Tolkien’s theory of fairy-story, particularly the concepts of recovery and eucatastrophe, show how narrative can sustain moral perception when abstraction proves insufficient. Owen Barfield, Paul Ricoeur, and Charles Taylor further illuminate how participatory imagination allows meaning to remain intelligible under conditions of grief and moral disorder. Lewis and Tolkien do not deny chaos, but they refuse to grant it metaphysical ultimacy. Christian fairy-story emerges as a disciplined imaginative practice that forms the moral imagination, enabling readers to endure suffering without surrendering hope in a disenchanted age.
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JIS XXXVIII 2026: 109-126
BAPTIZED IMAGINATION:
MYTH AND THE RECOVERY OF OBJECTIVE VALUE
IN C. S. LEWIS AND J. R. R. TOLKIEN
Eric W. Parker & Benjamen D. Kilgore
Highlands College
___________________________________This essay explores the shared intellectual and imaginative project of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien in response to the moral and metaphysical crises of modernity. Focusing on Lewis’s The Abolition of Man and Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories,” the essay argues that both writers defend the reality of objective value and humanity’s capacity to perceive meaning through myth, fantasy, and rightly-ordered affection. Lewis’s concepts of the Tao, “men without chests,” and participatory knowledge complement Tolkien’s understanding of recovery, subcreation, and eucatastrophe. Lewis’s distinction between “looking at” and “looking along” experience demonstrates how myth functions not merely as imaginative escape but as a mode of participatory knowledge capable of shaping moral perception. Tolkien’s conception of Christianity as the “True Myth” provided the imaginative framework that helped resolve Lewis’s tension between mythic longing and philosophical materialism. Against the disenchantment, fragmentation, and subjectivism of late modernity, Lewis and Tolkien present myth and fairy-story as formative instruments for recovering the moral imagination and restoring humanity’s capacity to perceive truth, goodness, beauty, and transcendence.
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JIS XXXVIII 2026: 127-156
FAIRY - STORY AND THE MORAL IMAGINATION:
DISNEY’S PRE - CHRISTIAN STORYTELLING
Jeremy E. Scarbrough
Pasco-Hernando State College
___________________________________This essay examines Disney’s animated-feature tradition through the interpretive lens provided by C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, arguing that their understanding of fairy-story helps illuminate the apologetic potential of non-sectarian storytelling within a post-Christian culture. Rather than treating Disney as comparable to Lewis and Tolkien in literary or theological achievement, the essay contends that Disney’s most enduring narratives exemplify the “pre-Christian” power of widely shared stories to cultivate moral imagination, awaken existential longing, and render moral and teleological order perceptible at the level of experience without explicitly grounding such order theologically. Drawing upon Lewis’s conception of the “True Myth” and Tolkien’s understanding of fairy-story, recovery, and eucatastrophe, the essay concludes that narratives shaped by moral attunement, longing for restoration, and recognition of order and disorder continue to resonate because they reflect patterns of meaning ultimately grounded in the Christian story.
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FORUM FOR DIALOGUE
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JIS XXXVIII 2026: 157-173
THE PROMISE OF TRANSFORMATION
IN FAIRY – STORIES: A RESPONSE
Daniel W. Hollis III
Jacksonville State University
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Cambry Pardee pursues the theme of transformation in J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, showing how the aspects of journey and seed in the stories broaden the perspectives of the characters to reach a eucatastrophe. Next, C. S. Lewis’s story of Eustace from the Chronicles of Narnia demonstrates the dual functions of external and internal factors to reach a transformation which Lewis called “surprise,” the counterpart to Tolkien’s eucatastrophe. Pardee ends by relating the fairy-story to the process of Christian sanctification. This response expands on this theme by emphasizing the merging of the supernatural dimension (Creation) with the natural realm (sub-creation) in Tolkien’s and Lewis’s stories. The sub-creation of mankind offers a mirror function of God’s Creation, which is best illustrated by the use of fairy-stories to demonstrate the Christian’s struggle to be Christ-like. Invoking the Inklings and the theme of Christianity, the essay examines Lewis’s Pilgrim’s Regress and Till We Have Faces to illustrate his view that character-stumbling necessitates supernatural external assistance to recover through transformation of one’s childlike faith.
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JIS XXXVIII 2026: 174-192
THERE AND B ACK AGAIN:
THE PROMISE OF CHRISTIAN FAIRY - TALES
William R. Clough
Samaritan Counseling Services of the Gulf Coast
___________________________________The 38th thematic volume of the Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies tackles an idea whose time has come, the re-enchantment of narrative in a materialistic and cynical age. Arguably, storytelling is the foundational function of consciousness. Facts, sense perceptions, are turned into cause, effect, meaning, and purpose. Human society is formed through shared narratives, myths, and histories. Even the concept of “self” is a string of memories laced into a unified story of identity. Narrative may be the process by which the unconscious–personal, experimental, and collective–becomes conscious. The essays in this volume form a narrative arc leading out into the world of imagination and aspiration, and back to the world of familiar things. Taken together they fulfill J. R. R. Tolkien’s essential functions of fairy-tales: escape–a legitimate response to cultural-spiritual imprisonment; recovery–the restoration of clear sight; and finally, consolation–through what Tolkien calls “eucatastrophe,” the sudden joyous turn when hope triumphs over despair, and the reader returns to the everyday world empowered to live fully here and now. C. S. Lewis suggested the genre possesses a unique ability to express complex human truths concretely without being bogged down by unnecessary sentimentality or raising unrealistic expectations about the world.
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