All right, friends, it's time to peace out while I work on this thing called "writing a thesis." I'll log in once a day to check DMs, but otherwise I'll see you in October. Until then, Happy Equinox, Blessed Mabon, Happy Hobbit Day, and Shanah Tovah, plus anything I inadvertently missed. ✌🏻

Good thing I've kept a complete bibliography of every book, book chapter, journal article, magazine article, essay, blog post, lecture, conference paper, review, film, YouTube video, or podcast I've encountered in the last 5 years. Otherwise I would be going insane right now. #PhDLife

Two months into new ADHD meds and another side-effect I didn't anticipate is a radical reduction in my caffeine intake. I had been drinking 5-6 cups of coffee a day for years. Now I can only drink a single cup in the morning before getting the jitters. It makes perfect sense - just unexpected!

Leading up to my final year at uni, I won a pretty prestigious scholarship for postgrads going into careers in public service, and I remember the baffled looks my cohort gave me when I described myself as a "religious philosopher." The nomenclature has changed since then, but the bafflement has not.

The paradox of free speech is that any right, pursued to its logical extreme, will come to exclude all others. A fascist's "right to free speech" is in direct conflict with an oppressed person's right to be free from mob violence and state repression. No one right is ever totalizing. 1/4

When I was choosing a PhD topic, a loved one told me that under no circumstances was I allowed to do one on politics and theology because it would make me insufferable to be around. Turns out I couldn't escape it in Tolkien studies either: the politics and theology bit, *and* the insufferable bit.

If you've not read this essay, or even if you have, I can't recommend it enough. In the first place, it's incredibly insightful, well-written, and proof positive that brilliant Tolkien scholarship can and does happen outside the academy. In the second place, it makes me cry.

In many ways I'm glad my family is moving back to the U.S. My kids, their mum, and I will have so much more family and community support there. Other things — the idea of my children growing up in a country where school shootings are "business as usual," for instance — I'm less thrilled about.

In America, guns are more important than Black people. Queer people. Native people. Working people. Poor people. Disabled people. Immigrants. Women. Children. If that's the world you want, so be it. But that world has consequences, and you don't get to disavow them when they become inconvenient.

My faith tells me that any loss of human life is a tragedy. Even when violence becomes necessary in defense of innocent people, it remains a tragedy. And. If you build a society in which guns are more important than human life, then you implicitly accept the consequences of what you have wrought.

Boredom isn't the point of Shabbat, still less productivity. But I was invited into the practice by Jewish loved ones in past, and I cannot overstate the value of hitting STOP on the never-ending flood of input and just *being*. So much of my best creative work comes through in that spaciousness.

In an age of relentless stimulus/response, we forget the creative power of boredom. See also: checking out of marking exams, only to scribble "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit" on a blank page.

Found it! Here's the quote, from a 1966 interview with Henry Resnick, reprinted in the fan journal Niekas in 1967. Thanks to @timbolton.bsky.social and @alas-not-me.bsky.social for directing me to the source!

Tolkien folks: I recall an interview from the 1960s where JRRT gets fed up with the interviewer drawing heavy-handed parallels between LotR and Christianity and says something like, "You don't have to be Christian to believe it's important to sacrifice something!" Is this real? And if so, source?

However, I did get to use one of my favorite phrases in the English language: "crush the Slave Power."

A Scottish colleague recently asked, "How's thesis revision going?" I responded, "Like General Sherman marching to the sea, we're making progress." They were, to put it mildly, confused, so I then had to spend several minutes explaining the course of the U.S. Civil War.

I rewatched the 1977 animated Hobbit for the first time in ages and loved it as much as ever. It would benefit from being half again as long (only 78 minutes!), but the music is fantastic, the cast mostly works for me, and the visuals are funky in that way you could only get away with in the 1970s.

One of the coolest parts of my PhD is that, in interviewing people about why they love The Lord of the Rings so much, they have taught me why *I* love The Lord of the Rings so much. Stories are really important, guys. I know it can seem trivial, but stories are really important.

Nearing the end of your PhD means furiously revising your thesis while also furiously writing postdoc applications while also furiously scanning job openings while also furiously tying up the loose ends of all the projects you foolishly agreed to 18 months ago.

Parents should be a hell of a lot more concerned about having to explain an ongoing genocide to their kids than having to explain that trans people exist.

Tolkien and I disagree on a lot, but on this we are of one accord: the domination of other wills is a sin. Full stop. And worship of the power to dominate is an unmitigated disaster at every conceivable level: individual and interpersonal, political and ecological, cosmic and spiritual alike.

TLDR: tech-bro fascists lack reading comprehension skills, news at 11

Tim @fiduch.bsky.social shared this Bad Tolkien Take on FB. Quite apart from Luckey founding Anduril Industries, which makes *military drones and surveillance systems* (I'm sure Tolkien would have loved that), Lewis's take on "almost the central theme" of LotR is… not especially perceptive. 1/3

Eowyn and Ioreth in the Houses of Healing, for Tolkien Reverse Summer Bang 2025! The wonderful accompanying fic by labyrinth_runner will be revealed soon 💖 #Tolkien #art

Parents should be a hell of a lot more concerned about having to explain an ongoing genocide to their kids than having to explain that trans people exist.

‪I've been putting off watching the new Lindsay Ellis vid because my children a) adore Miss Rachel (I've become a big fan too), b) are Jews for whom learning about genocide is non-negotiable, and c) are also growing up in the middle of a live-streamed genocide. So yeah, it's gonna wreck my shit.

"Why do you draw, Fujino?" Finally got around to seeing Look Back tonight. A beautiful, heartbreaking little film about art, and friendship, and the joy we bring each other. It does more in an hour than many movies do in three. Go watch it.

Not that I get to choose these things, but I just learnt that my external examiner on my PhD will be an Oxford professor I like and respect tremendously and I'm pretty excited to have them on my team!

It's unusual in Miyazaki's oeuvre insofar as Sheeta is a pretty passive character. But Gran'ma Dola rocks and the films on either side of it (Nausicaä, Totoro, Kiki) all star fantastic female protagonists.

I re-watched Castle in the Sky last night. It's long been a sentimental favorite of mine, pure adventure story with a phenomenal soundtrack (obviously). You can see so many of the themes that would obsess Miyazaki for decades to come: steampunk tech, war, ecology, innocence, and—of course—flight.

The only person in the books who ever used a Palantír correctly was Aragon, who DM'ed Sauron with "I lived, bitch" and then logged off forever King shit

Going for a pint with Tolkien would be lovely, of course, but we're far enough removed in time that I'm not sure he'd know what to make of me. Le Guin was born in the same timeframe as my grandparents, but she was FAR more radical than them. I'd like to think we'd get on well enough for brunch.

Had a lovely dream last night where I interviewed Ursula Le Guin over an unhurried, hourslong brunch. We discussed theories of fantasy literature, spicy SFF gossip from the 1960s up through the 2000s, and our shared adoration of Portland and the Wilamette Valley. Sorry to wake up, honestly.

When I finish my thesis, I will hold both a humanities PhD as well as ordination in a mainline Protestant denomination. This will allow me to style myself "The Rev. Dr. Tom Emanuel," which will be cool, but it will also make me the least employable person imaginable.

52 years ago, on 2 September 1973, J.R.R. Tolkien left the circles of this world for whatever lies beyond them. He left to the living a world of his own, and I can never thank him enough. In his honor, I took a crack at recreating this classic photo at Merton College, Oxford. I think I did okay.

CW: binge eating, weight discourse One of the unforeseen side effects of my new ADHD meds is wild appetite suppression. Since 2020 I've had a pretty serious binge eating problem. Now I have to make sure I eat ENOUGH during the day and have lost some serious weight as a result. (My doctor is aware.)

To be clear, I believe in God (albeit in some pretty wacky ways), so my sense of hope in the Primary World is grounded in that. But the emotional tenor of hope in LotR feels far truer to life than many Christian articulations I've come across. Too often, it just feels like spiritual bypassing.

You might say, "Christianity does those things too." And you'd be right! But Christianity frames them in theological terms. LotR doesn't. Sam and Frodo don't hope because they trust in God. They hope because, if they don't, the task will never succeed. It probably won't anyway. Still they go on.

When I read the Gospels, I come away believing that Love conquers all. When I read The Lord of the Rings, I come away believing that hope and loss are inextricably linked, that grief and joy are wound together as tight as a double helix. Not incompatible, but different. And I need them both.

This is why I was accused of heresy at my ecclesiastical council, the body which votes whether to ordain you in the United Church of Christ. Heresy is a ridiculous charge in a noncreedal church like the UCC, and everyone else at the council knew it. Dude was the only "nay" vote. Still hilarious.

The soup of my faith contains flavors you wouldn't expect to go together: contemplative Christianity, process theology, Jewish Renewal, earth-centered lessons I've learned from my Lakota teachers, queer liberation, socialism, existentialism, some New Age woo, and (of course) The Lord of the Rings.

The Divine takes many forms for me: the aforementioned mommy dom; the loving mentor who's not afraid to kick my ass sometimes; the spirit of Life that breathes in all Creation; the compassionate Christ; the prophet crying out for justice; the still small voice within. God contains multitudes!

Recently, after I called God an "uncomfortably hot mommy dom," a friend accused me of being a closeted Pentecostal, but because I'm a queer, multifaith, Tolkien-obsessed Pentecostal, I get a pass. I forget how insane my spirituality sounds when I try to explain it to people who Aren't Like That.

Ok, hear me out. A Lord of the Rings remake, but with these two taking the One Ring to Mordor:

My scholarship gives away my background as a preacher. You can always tell when I'm heading into my conclusion because that's when the technical language fades away and the soaring rhetoric kicks in, full of metaphors and litanies and stories. It's the writerly equivalent of playing 'Free Bird'.

For the next four months I will be knocking my PhD thesis into shape for submission by January. I'll be unspeakably busy and yet also have a lot of unstructured time. So, when my brain is no longer capable of thinking straight, I will be re-watching the complete cinematic oeuvre of Hayao Miyazaki.

A prayer I've been repeating to myself a lot lately is "God, liberate me from the prison of myself." I dunno if that's useful to anyone else, but I've been using it like a goddamned (God-blessed?) mantra and it seems to help.

I've drafted two novels, half of a third, and plotted a fourth, but I don't call myself a "novelist" because only one of those is the story of my heart. Plus, if you asked me for my top inspirations, I'd say Studio Ghibli, the Mother video games, Undertale, and LotR. Not the most marketable comps!

For my religious friends: any good spiritual counseling services out there? I like my therapist but would love somebody who gets the God Thing, as that's my primary lens on myself, my relationships, and the world. They'd need to be theologically progressive though - no "Christian counseling" (yikes)

I've wanted to get this specific image of Sophie and Howl as a tattoo for ages. I'm feeling that it's about time - not quite yet, but soon.