call me weird but this is right up there with my favorite interviews, they hit on every topic that i find interesting and i don’t even know who these guys are! if i was sitting in a pub and overheard them i would eavesdrop for hours to pick their brains!

I loved the bit about Tolkien's 'lingering' writing style as being medicinal for modern people. Ever since I got a smartphone, I can absolutely attest to basically developing late-onset ADHD. It's honestly unsettling to be aware that you don't feel the same appreciations for the little things (and big things), and feel generally restless. And I know I'm not alone. The growing industry of fidget toys for children should be a huge warning sign that maybe overstimulation is a problem.

I remember reading the Abolition of Man (which is just the essay version of That Hideous Strength) when I was 18 (7 years ago) and I thought, “wow, thank God society didn’t head the direction he thought we were going”. But I woke up one day a few months ago, and it suddenly hit me that basically everything he warns about has come true and I hadn’t even realized it, kind of like a fish discovering he lived in water.

when Galadriel yelled “IT’S TOLKIEN TIME!” and Tolkien’d all over those Orcs. It was both stunning and brave.

I am back. This is the video. Before this I started reading books that I heard are great; 1984, Brave New Word, Animal Farm. And yes they definitely were great, but hopeless. It was after watching this podcast I started reading Screwtapes Letters, The The Space Trilogy and finally I just finished minutes ago The Lord of the Ring Trilogy.. what deep and uplifting works that reminds me to look up to heaven and then back to my wife, children and home and be happy, and to love them, and to see the good that God has given me. So I am back here to rewatch the podcast that finally got me to read those great works and that introduced me to Pints with Aquinas.

Love how the Australia is still upside down

Relating social media vs. the real and present to busy Martha vs. Mary at the feet of the Lord... wow. Piercing insight. Only about halfway through this talk but I'm very grateful for it so far. Bless you all.

They’re talking about the ransom trilogy in the first 10 mins… this is going to be great

Lewis' Space triology is awesome! And what's more awesome is hearing someone else actually knows it. I read it for the first time a few years back when it wasn't translated into our language yet and I just wanted so bad to talk about it with someone I was tempted to force my husband to read it in English. It has been translated since but I'm still waiting for my husband to pick it up.

The Ransom Trilogy is one of my favourites. I think the reason for its lack of popularity compared to the Narnia series is that it’s not as accessible intellectually. The Ransom Triology takes a good bit of thinking (something I’m not very good at). That’s not me saying people who choose the Narnia series are somehow less intellectual though, it just has a lower barrier to getting into the world and enjoying it.

Space trilogy!!!!! Yeeeesssssa

This conversation .... :’) I never thought I’d hear again such things since mom passed away ~ she was my muse ~

I love all Matt´s interviews. I have found inspiring people that I´ve never imagined is in the same page as I am. Every single one is a tresure!

My favorite episode

Brilliant interview, from the joy of reading to wonder interspelled with song & prose & thought! Excellent! Thanks be to God

This is a beautiful conversation, I love the long form shows.

This is honestly my favourite episode of ALL TIME!!😭😭🤩🤩

Such a fun chat!! Thank so much!

This was fantastic, thank you both!! 🙏🏻

This convo is so amazing

Nod to the Arcatheos shout out - this summer was my family's first encounter with this amazing camp. My 12 year old son finally got to taste a world that engaged him deeply and brought him to life... imagination, battles, men. This conversation as a whole was excellent. I will watch it again.

Wonderful conversation as usual, guys! Keep it up!

I discovered LOTOR at 18. I didn't sleep for 3 days. I read the whole thing. It was the best story I have read, a notch below the Bible.

Okay Bill, I am signing up for this TOB-Tolkien course! I remember in one of the TOB Q&As we were talking about a Tolkien course. So glad it will soon be a reality!

Love how you start with humbling this great man 🤣🤣 and love his confession of not reading “Brothers” …right there with you….So excited for this discussion…so inspired by BD

This is one of the best interviews on PwA I think. Excellent!

2:02:05 this quote was breathtaking! My iPhone has replaced my rosary beads... Going to search for more content from this guy. Thanks for the introduction!

No one should sleep on the Hobbit though. Also the Appendices are the coolest, I just finished my year long read through of the Hobbit + the Lord of the Rings with the appendices, and it was great!

These interviews are a great consolation for me. Please don't stop these haha! These lift my soul and make me appreciate beauty and God's love and mercy. God love ya!

It sounds like it is raining outside and I love it💕💕

22:10 Nerd of the Rings got a shout out, nice! I think this is a great channel about Tolkien's lore :)

Love LOTR 6th grade vacation with family in Florida! Within a week, I finished the entire trilogy & had a serious sunburn to show for my obsession!!

Ha, exact same reading list! I finally feel vindicated in my choice of reading matter :-D. And yes, I just keep cycling through the same ones too... That Hideous Strength is scarily prophetic/ relevant to the moment...

This was beautiful. Yo I REALLY hope we get that Korean guy on! Those quotes were incredibly based!

There and back again.... sigh ~ been away from Oregon 11 years now ~ I dream of returning but it has been so badly desecrated ~ perhaps one day....

There is a message that says “No stream,” should probably look into it….

Matt I wanted to say that while social media may have its price, as someone who has never been religious, been to church or read the bible, I discovered your channel (and am a regular viewer) after seeing you on an episode of The Babylon Bee. So in a sense the very tools that can cause harm can also be an avenue for good.

Little tip- introduce the guests audibly at the beginning of th epodcst. Some of us have podcast services that don't show the full title and it helps when you push play to have some idea who you're listening to. :)

I’m getting a “No stream” message…

Amazon's Rings of Power has nothing to do with Tolkien except that the showrummers can use some of the characters. They made up many characters as well as Inserting races that do not belong in his mythopoeic world. This is not being true to Tolkien. They justify doing this by stating that it must reflect the world we live in today. But of course this is not the world of Tolkien's legendarium. He created a mythopoeic world which blends Catholic themes and Norse mythology to create a myth of England. In other words, a myth that could have been the product of Christianized Medieval Northern Europe. All the mythopoeic conceptions such as elves and dwarves are of course reflections of the Norse and they would look like them. No one until five minutes ago would perceive of an elf in the context of Norse myth as being a person that looks like Idris Elba. In this Amazon show they have a POC playing a dwarf, Hobbits, and elves. The "queen" of Numenor Tar-Míriel is also a POC, which she was neither the ruling queen, her husband Ar-Pharazon who married her against her will was, nor a POC. Galadriel is made into a warrior which she never was because women have to all act like men in order to be considered strong. They desecrate femininity. They describe her as "full of piss and vinegar." On one of the promotional pictures she is man spreading while dangling a dagger between her legs. Many of the actors consider themselves activists and are clearly wokeists, as are the showrunnres. Tolkien would have despised all of this. If you respect Tolkien and his work, you would not support this abomination.

Lmbooo his face when he said “go on” 😳😂😂😂

my favorite

@mattfradd & Neil, a thought I had around the 57:15 mark was the concept of sacrament, in order for a sacrament to take place there needs to be form, matter, and intent. With the metaverse we lack the matter, the form is augmented and the intent is often lacking. This perhaps would be the grossness you allude to, the perversion of reality. Just a thought 👍

Matt, I'm an engineer and ... I hate to break it to you ... but the complex flow paths in the pipe you were describing are technology too...it's everywhere bro! Love that you're talking about the right way the faithful should handle it ... but I think a very prayerful and nuanced approach is actually needed. The phone cannot "act on you." What you can do is relinquish your ability to act due to the temptation the phone represents. I think we need to get away from language that assigns agency to things that have none. We've got it. Angels got it. God's got it. Phones don't. Also, for the record, I get on airplanes and open up the blinds when I have a window seat...

The space trilogy is actually a novelization of his WW two BBC lecture The Abolition of Man

The sleeping gets me every time

I was what, between 7 and 9 (-ish) when I first "met" Tolkien. The exact timeline is a little muddled, now - this is over thirty years ago. My grandfather on my father's side had a little summer cottage out where he grew up in the south of Iceland. Our family would often go there on the weekends, and along the way stop in the general store in the nearby village. It sold a bit of everything - groceries, tools, books, and music. Among the books there were comic book versions of Lord of the Rings, I think adapted from Bakshi's animated films (it only went up to Helm's Deep, anyway, and from what I remember, the general style was similar), and I'd read through those in the store while my parents (or grandparents, depending on who I was with) were doing the shopping. At around the same time, my father read The Hobbit for me and my sister. That version is still my preferred translation, even when some of the names were unnecessarily translated. (He also read for us the Narnia stories, or at least all that had been translated at the time, as well as some of the more fantasy-oriented stories by Astrid Lindgren, such as 'Ronia, the Robber's Daughter' and 'The Brothers Lionheart'). Then, when I was ten or eleven, my friend's mother (also my mother's friend) got a stipend to spend a couple of months in Finland, some sort of Nordic artist co-operation thing. We were on some island just outside Helsinki, an old fortress town, and while there, there was an outdoor theatre that put on the entirety of Lord of the Rings. In Finnish, obviously. That was a little bit surreal, mainly because none of us understood anything of it. I had a little background from those comics I had read - but mostly it was just weird (and a little scary at times - Finnish can sound pretty menacing when they want). The Hobbit I'd read a few times, of course - both when I wanted to (in English, too, when I was 11 or 12 - it may well be the first book of that length that I read in English, obviously made easier since I was so familiar with it) and also when the school required it (it is, or at least was, a pretty popular book to use in English classes - for what I hope are pretty obvious reasons), but Lord of the Rings I only read when they finally were translated and published, '93-'95. My father did have them in English, but it was a fairly cheap paperback version and the ink had sort of smudged, making it a little too much of a bother to read, some words were just illegible and I don't want to read and then have to start wondering what word that is supposed to be. Those translations I got as a Christmas present from my grandfather (he and the translator/publisher were cousins, shared the same grandfather) each year they were published, and then I just devoured them in the days between Christmas and New Year's Eves. In fact, I enjoy them so much that while I've re-read them a fair few times, I've yet to read the English version...

I’m scotch Irish but half TexMex. I’d have to sing El Paso by Marty Robbins, which I’d argue would be the closest to a non Irish ballad. God bless Bill Donaghy and Matt Fradd

Re: the e-book vs streaming music discussion (~1:36:00) it seems to me once music is removed from live performance to a studio produced version the experience receiving is little different whether through a CD of streaming device, so it makes sense to widely adopt the more convenient format. With books, the reading experience is substantially different vs. paper and things that can only be done with hard copy, putting more of a brake on the tech adoption.

Listening to the parts of this conversation made me realize you really need to interview Paul Kingsnorth. He's an ex-pagan, ex-environmental activist who recently converted to traditional Christianity and writes about the technological industrial machine that's enveloped the globe and how that's cut humans off from any sense of rootedness and community and has given rise to technocratic authoritarianism. He also currently lives in Ireland :)

Hey Matt, it's definitely not as detailed or good as LotR but Warhammer 40k The Horus Heresy series is a wonderful journey. I love all of the catholic undertones and the overarching lesson the story contains that religion and the spiritual is inescapable. That God, good, and evil are always there no matter how much you ignore them. Good and evil will always find a way and wrestle with each other.

Bill Donaghy is the man.

Regarding Tom Bombadil; This is from the Song of Songs (2:8-2:10) : “The voice of my beloved, behold he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping over the hills. My beloved is like a roe, or a young hart. Behold he standeth behind our wall, looking through the windows, looking through the lattices. Behold my beloved speaketh to me: Arise, make haste, my love, my dove, my beautiful one, and come.” Sounds familiar? (:

The problem with all the social media is that the content listed on the screen can be manipulated something that a book can't do and on that sense we are leaving in a matrix were some players are trying to do the right thing...

1:59:20 I think he’s talking about The Transparency Society by Byung-Chul Han. worth checking out

1:17 ish Yes! Stout all the way, unless I can have a porter brew.

Matt, please get a CS Lewis and or a GK Chesterton expert on the show.

I'm not sure if there is such a thing as "American culture" but there is certainly a thing as Appalachian culture, which has itself descended from Irish and Scottish traditions.

I feel like this might be a serious question for KZfaq comments, but why doesn't Matt ever introduce his guest? I usually don't know these thinkers and could really use a primer during the show, plus it would probably be nice for the guest! - signed, a loyal viewer.

Love so much about this but just feel that a few things need to be clarified: 1. Having an area of pub where women aren't allowed is *not* the way to restart the Inklings 2. I was about to stop watching Stranger Things 4 for the exact reasons mentioned here, but there's a scene at the end of Episode 4 that completely changes the perspective and (in my opinion) makes the whole season worth watching.

I used to carry and distribute water and small sealed snacks at traffic lights and what not here in blistering Orlando, but one day I got a guy who declined but he told me that many stopped not because they wanted money instead for their own means but because people were cruelly tainting things and many had been scared off of the generosity that authentic people may have wanted to give. I always struggled with giving the money but if I have a buck or two I give, I dont worry about what they may do, I try to believe it is noble their intention, and just do because the doing something is the important part. This is the 1st full interview on PWA that I have watched and next will be with the middle eastern gentleman, but it has been so elucidating that at times I feel great and times I feel like dirt, but I know that means complacency is being jabbed.

OHHHHHHH.... MY!!!! I never made the whole Mars and Venus connections in the first two books.

Cameron may also mean shrimp, or more of a relation to the sea.

2:29:20 Hey, regarding the pledge to renounce alcohol. In Poland, where we had (and probably still have) a huge problem with alcohol abuse, being a post-soviet country, there is a movement called Krucjata Wyzwolenia Człowieka (The Crusade for Human Liberation). It started in 1957 under different name and was initiated by fr. Franciszek Blachnicki. Its goal is to support addicted people, especially alcoholics, in fight against their addictions. Every member pledges to fully abstain from alcohol, also not to buy or offer any alcohol and to pray every day for addicted. Alcoholics testify that it's much easier for them not to drunk at parties and oppose the peer pressure when there is someone else present who doesn't drink alcohol. The Crusade is not only for alcohol - it states that real freedom means being free of any addictions, including tobacco or porn. However, alcohol isn't evil itself (contrary to porn), so this takes form of a visible, voluntary fasting. I think in general Franciszek Blachnicki's work is very worth studying, if you're interested in such movements against addictions!

Ebooks have not taken off like music etc because no one is reading. People get their info from social media and it takes hard work to read a book or anything for that matter.

Books are also aesthetically pleasing

C.S.Lewis space trilogy is by far my favorite set of books. Just barely above the Middle Earth Lore from J.R.R. Tolkien.

❤❤❤❤❤❤❤❤

I really love that quote, "A life unlike your own can be your greatest teacher" but can't find the source for it! Does anyone know the source? I know he said "Saint Columban" but I haven't been able to trace it.

Yes!!! The problem with saying there should not be Christians involved in a social medium is akin to saying that the people immersed in it are not worthy to be redeemed. What if that is the only way they could be reached? Just asking the question to provoke thought.

Clothes... wardrobe remains the same when you find clothes that are comfortable and ‘you’ and you stop caring what social media and culture says is correct. Tolkien. I know I skipped paragraphs at a time when I got bored with over-descriptiveness... but need to re-read them.

I really wanna know if the coffee and pastry are from Leonardo’s Coffeehouse

Tom Bombdil gives me shades of st Francis

The korean philosopher name is Byung-chul Han

55:00 The doctrines of creation, incarnation, and resurrection call Christians to remain stubbornly embodied.

I’ve been thinking a lot about America and Culture. I have two thoughts 💭 1) the lack of a uniting culture is an unexpected outcome of the great American experiment. People uprooted themselves from the culture of their home lands and came to America, swapping their cultural grounding for a document, the constitution, and the rights enumerated therein. 2) Maybe a nation needs TIME to develop a truly meaningful culture and America’s cultural development was halted/supplanted by the smart phone/TV. Technology’s victory over culture.

Does anyone know if the book by the Korean philosopher that Bill was quoting from? (Starting with the connection between smartphones and rosary beads)?

I wonder if Bill has read John Senior.

What is the poem Matt reads about having nothing to do called?

Gandalf was taking them to the eagles. When he falls in Moria he says "Fly you fools!"

This video has no sound? Other KZfaq videos do as well as the ads so I don't think it's my device. Anyone else unable to hear it?

No sound for me. I don't know why

Great interview, keep trying to get Jordan Peterson, love to see him on here

Tom Bombadil is G. K. Chesterton. Yeah, you heard me right. Tolkien was influenced by Chesterton, and there are a few similarities between LOTR and Bombadil, and some things that Chesterton wrote. A few of those similarities are almost too similar to be coincidence.

Matt, we love you, and thank you for this channel. But you keep interrupting Bill. Keep in mind whose turn it is in the conversation.

Sound check?

I’m currently reading the Fellowship, but on a Kindle. After hearing of Tolkien’s extreme disapproval of electronics, I feel I am in a way disrespecting the story. This update brought to you on an iPhone.

rings of power will have nothing to do with Tolkien but some of his names, its going to be a woke 'not good show', the show runners dont have respoect for Tolkien of his catholic believes and put their own in it. DONT WATCH IT

Cameron can also mean "crooked/winding river". I think your wife might like that definition better

What was the beer that he recommended? Anyone remember?

Reading on the Kindle starts to hurt the eyes

Why is Australia upsidedown?

Nerd of the Rings is a great channel! Also you're too kind to Amazon, Bill.

Bezos isn't a Tolkien fan. He just wanted his own game of thrones

1:42:05 It's weird how you emphasize on capitalizing God, so it isn't grammar norm in english? It's not my first language so I'm unsure now

The comment about not being able to get Jordan Peterson on the show aged beautifully lol

No sound

Anyone else getting no audio?

I've been a wild rover

Sounds not working