Holly E. Ordway

Holly Ordway is an American author, Tolkien scholar, and academic. She serves as the Cardinal Francis George Professor of Faith and Culture at the Word on Fire Institute and is a Visiting Professor of Apologetics at Houston Christian University. She previously served as the founding Chair of the Department of Apologetics and Director of the Master of Arts in Apologetics program at HCU, where she architected the program's foundational curriculum. She won a 2022 Mythopoeic Award for her book Tolkien's Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages.

Life

Holly Ordway gained her bachelor's degree in English at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1995. She took an MA in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in 1997, and completed her PhD in English back at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2011. In 2005 she joined the faculty at MiraCosta College, Oceanside, California, teaching English literature. She took a further MA in Christian Apologetics at Biola University in 2011.

In 2012, Ordway was recruited by Houston Christian University Provost John Mark Reynolds to help found the university's new graduate program in apologetics, alongside Mary Jo Sharp and Nancy Pearcey.

Since 2010, when she became a Christian while already a lecturer,

Awards and distinctions

In 2021, Michael Ward and others published An Unexpected Journal: The Imaginative Harvest of Holly Ordway: Celebrating the Difference a Teacher Can Make about Ordway.

In 2022, Ordway won a Mythopoeic Scholarship Award in Inklings Studies for her book Tolkien's Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages.

Books

Written

(revised ed., Ignatius Press, 2014)

Edited

Reception

Not God's Type

Janet Brennan Croft notes that Ordway's apologetics may interest Mythlore readers, as Ordway credits the Inkling authors Tolkien and C. S. Lewis for her conversion from being an atheist to a Roman Catholic.

Hannah Bitner, for The Christian Librarian, writes that as a child, Ordway longed to immerse herself in the imagined worlds of Anne McCaffrey and Gene Roddenberry. The joy of these worlds faded, but that of Tolkien did not, even though Ordway was an atheist, unwilling to accept the Christianity behind Middle-earth. She became a Catholic when a Christian friend enabled her "to see The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia with fresh eyes."

Tolkien's Modern Reading

Tolkien's Faith

The Protestant minister Tom Emanuel, in Journal of Tolkien Research, writes that Ordway's earlier book, Tolkien's Modern Reading, gave him the strong impression that she was frustrated with Carpenter's depiction of Tolkien as "a staunch anti-modernist". Emanuel was therefore not as surprised as Ordway was that she would write a "Roman Catholic biography" of the author, in which she states up front that earlier scholarship played down Tolkien's faith, and her work is meant to counterbalance that, indeed to show that his faith was as he had indicated "central to his identity". She adds that she is writing a "work of biography, not a[n all-positive] hagiography". Emanuel writes that Ordway's intention already "expresses a particular perspective", assuming there is "only one kind of Catholicism", and opposing a major theme of both Carpenter and Verlyn Flieger: " that even as he was a staunch Roman Catholic, Tolkien was also man of paradoxes, and it is his dynamic tensions which power his literary art." Emanuel notes that Tolkien's friend, the Jesuit priest Robert Murray, cautioned that he "could not support an interpretation" which set Tolkien's Catholic faith as "the key to everything". Emanuel comments that Dimitra Fimi warned in her book Tolkien, Race and Cultural History that it was not safe to take Tolkien's own word about himself, since he was building a "biographical legend" to place literary criticism of himself in the frame he wanted.

Emanuel writes that he "actually agree with Ordway" that subjectivity on religion is inevitable, and it can be productive. He finds it so in parts of Ordway's book, where she has found aspects of Tolkien's life "which a non-Catholic would miss"; and he notes the "painstaking research" into Tolkien's time at the Birmingham Oratory from 1904 onwards. But he observes that Ordway does not consider whether the Oratory, and Father Francis Morgan's guardianship, was necessarily always "perfectly benign". He comments, too, that Ordway seemingly intentionally ignores evidence of anti-Protestant prejudice. She largely avoids the question of Tolkien's attitude to race, complete with higher and lower "human-like beings" on the lines of the medieval great chain of being, a matter clearly related to his faith. In Emanuel's view, the book largely fails "to acknowledge the wider social and political valences of Tolkien's faith." He expresses "enormous sympathy" for Ordway and her feeling that The Lord of the Rings was for her "the Roman Catholic work of imaginative apologetics par excellence". He interprets her biography of Tolkien as "an attempt to lead others" to the Catholic faith, whether consciously intended as such or not. Was Tolkien then "a plaster saint" for Ordway? She replies to that "No. A complex, fascinating, flawed, devout, funny and brilliant man"; in other words, Emanuel concludes, Tolkien was to Ordway a genuine saint; and the book is, despite Ordway's statement to the contrary, a hagiography.

The Catholic priest Juan R. Vélez, in The Downside Review, writes that Ordway proposes numerous possible sources for events in The Lord of the Rings from Tolkien's personal experiences, giving as an example the way that the protagonist Frodo Baggins's act of mercy to the monster Gollum "is repaid": Ordway likens this to the adolescent Tolkien's learning of forgiveness from Father Francis Morgan.