On Wednesday evenings during Eastertide, St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Annandale will present a special new program series led by Dr. Hannah Matis of the Virginia Theological Seminary. The program starts in the Parish Hall at 7pm on April 19, April 26, May 3 and May 10. Before each program starts, all are invited to join us at 6pm for Evening Prayer and supper at 6:20pm.
From Narnia to Middle-earth: The Theology of the Inklings
Despite the wide-reaching influence of both CS Lewis and JRR Tolkien, and their well-known influence on one another, we do not tend to read them together or even side by side. This Easter series will look at the interests, concerns, and context shared by both Lewis and Tolkien, what led them both to write fantasy, their integration of theology and fantasy in imaginative fiction, and the reach of their ideas today.
Hannah Matis, PhD
Hannah Matis, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Church History at Virginia Theological Seminary. She believes history is never about a string of dates, but about stories: the stories we tell ourselves about the past, true and false, the stories of forgotten people we can piece together from fragmentary bits of evidence, the stories of ways of life that are now lost to us. She reminds her students that more often than not, history is far more alive in our present than we think.
Her most recent book, The History of Women in Christianity to 1600 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2022), is built on her years of teaching and was written as a resource for both laypeople and seminarians. She is a graduate of the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame and of the University of Durham in the United Kingdom.