More open letters: Rev Todd and the Tolkien Professor

Sent versions of the other May posts to their respective authors, but to these teachers I had to address myself as well:

Questions for Narnion (the professor's loremaster avatar)

Eagle sounds?

I think I am mostly just happy to be here--excited about catching up (finally!) on all the podcasts so far, and appreciating the audacity and fun of this project--and so I wanted to throw a question out there. Since I just listen to these sessions instead of watching live, I have been wondering: What's going on with the bird-of-prey sound effects? Do they come about at specific times, when you say some magic words, or are they generated totally randomly, or something in between? I'll try to come up with a better question next time, but this has just been niggling at me...

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'Not your Shire'

Seems like an important phrase we keep coming back to. Here are some of the ways I have been turning it over, possible perspectives on it. See if you think they are interesting/valid at all:

- Something in the world has changed, objectively; this Shire infiltrated by rings and -wraiths is not the Shire which was yours. That Shire existed, but is now gone.

- That Shire you conceived of was never a thing. Your Shire only seemed safe and comfortable to you in your own ignorance of the truth. Thank goodness for an outbreak of obvious strangeness to set you straight.

- You have a misunderstanding of ownership which leads you to apply a possessive where it doesn't belong. This Shire is not your Shire, for all your maps and walking songs, sort of like the light of the Silmarils was not Feanor's, for all his craft and lore; or again like those mushrooms were not your mushrooms, just like those pears weren't Augustine's pears.

- Not only does the Shire not belong to you, but you don't even belong to the Shire; your home is elsewhere, and you must give up the Shire you love not once but repeatedly, now and after the scouring, and leave Middle-Earth entirely. We Elves can feel you on that.

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And for the atheist preacher

Like I said, I just wanted to send you a note appreciating and responding to your sermons. These past few weeks seem to make up a kind of series on Christian roots and UU flowerings, or in the language of the dialectic, on the movement of the idea through its successive encapsulations in faith and reason, both in your personal history and the bigger picture. Fascinating stuff!

I always try to take notes on the points you make, but the talk on the Centurion in particular got me thinking: it seems to me that what you say about the Roman Centurion representing authority and Jesus crucified representing the oppressed is true, but that in practice no one is fully in the position of either the one or the other. We each have something in us of the authoritarian, so that given certain kinds of power, we are bound to make mistakes and even commit frauds and do violence; we each have something in us of the oppressed, too, and suffer from the control and cruelty of others or of circumstances. Looking at it like this, the remarkable thing about that moment is that the Centurion recognizes that surely this man was the son of God, but that identification with the sufferer has to cut the other way, too: the suffering Christ is at the same time Christ Pantocrator....I don't know if that seems all that profound, but your way of talking about it made me realize that for me the challenge of faith is not just the paradox of God becoming man, the Word made flesh, but of the completely innocent, completely sinless human being who is also perfect in power, with ultimate authority. Taken as literally or as metaphorically as you like, these are difficult and interesting topics to turn, turn, turn, seeing them now in light and now in a healthy shadow.

Thanks for your time, and I'm looking forward to the next in the series!