Honors College Welcomes Joseph Loconte for Ethics & Culture Lecture

Intellectual historian and New York Times bestselling author Joseph Loconte, Ph.D., visited Baylor as the featured speaker for the Honors College’s Annual Ethics & Culture Lecture. His talk—War, Friendship, and Imagination: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and the Fight for Civilization—promised and delivered a banner event for the academic community.

Supported through the generosity of the late Donald Schmeltekopf (1939-2025) and Judy Schmeltekopf, this year’s program drew a standing-room-only audience to Armstrong Browning Library’s soaring Foyer of Meditation. Attending were students, friends and family of the Schmeltekopfs, and members of the broader Baylor community.

“Our goal with the lecture series is to explore ways that ethics and culture are intertwined,” said Dean of the Honors College Douglas Henry, Ph.D. “Good and evil, honor and dishonor, and virtue and vice aren’t textbook abstractions. They take shape and are given force in film, literature, law, politics, and other expressions of shared cultural life. Precisely in this vein, Dr. Loconte helped us to see the moral vision at work in two of the most beloved and heroic Christian authors of the last century.”

Loconte, an expert on the intersection of history, religion, and public life, examined how the experiences of war and cultural upheaval shaped the lives and writings of J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Both men served during World War I and later lived through the rise of totalitarian regimes and the global crisis of World War II.

“We cannot begin to understand their astonishing achievements as authors until we enter into their world, the world of crisis and conflict in which they lived,” Loconte said. “When we do that, we begin to see that much of what they wrote and taught was a deliberate rebuke to the ideologies that assaulted the dignity of the human person.”

Throughout the lecture, Loconte highlighted how Tolkien and Lewis used literature to speak to to the moral and spiritual confusion of their era. He pointed to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings as works that showed war-weary and sometimes despairing readers the character of courage, sacrifice, and hope, while Lewis’s writings, including Out of the Silent Planet and Mere Christianity, addressed questions of morality, faith, and human nature. Both men’s work expressed their convictions as devout followers of Christ, Tolkien as a Catholic and Lewis as an Anglican.

Loconte also emphasized the importance of the friendship between Tolkien and Lewis, whose regular meetings with fellow writers in The Inklings helped encourage and refine many of their most significant works.

“It was the tragedy of war that brought these two men together in friendship,” Loconte said. “And it was that friendship, joined with a circle of like-minded friends, that helped make possible some of the greatest literary works of the twentieth century.”

The lecture concluded with a reflection on Tolkien’s image of light enduring beyond darkness, a theme Loconte said captures the lasting hope found in the works of both authors. Quoting from The Return of the King, he celebrated Samwise Gamgee’s sight of a small, solitary star “peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains. . . . The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”

The Baylor Honors College expresses gratitude to Judy Schmeltekopf for her continued generosity in supporting the lecture series, and it honors the memory of Donald Schmeltekopf, whose long legacy of leadership and service continues to impact Baylor.