Stephen Wigmore

Stephen Wigmore is a Doctor of Philosophy and Ethics

Sunday

Stephen Wigmore

The moral inspiration of Tolkien’s universe

From our UK edition

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the new Tolkien-inspired TV series on Amazon Prime is already the most expensive television series in history. Amazon paid $250 million up-front for the rights, and has reportedly committed a billion dollars to future production. The fact a business as canny as Amazon would commit that much money to develop the appendices of a novel — which is what The Rings is based on — shows just how much cultural heft Tolkien’s works continue to have. The wild success of the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit film trilogies is matched by the popularity of the books behind them. Tolkien’s books and their adaptations have never attracted the scale of controversy that became attached to the Harry Potter saga, ever since J.K.

Sunday

Stephen Wigmore

Why the West still needs the Bible

From our UK edition

If you look to our schools and universities, you will not see a serious engagement with the Bible as part of the study of politics, of philosophy, or even of literature and culture more generally, despite the huge influence of Biblical ideas on the development of British, American and European politics – and so also across the Commonwealth and the world. University courses on political philosophy take a fundamentally ahistorical position of focusing on purely secular philosophers, rather than facing the reality of the Bible’s impact on the actual development of modern politics.