Popcorn, Elves, and the Almighty.
So, I was just trying to have a chill movie night. I hit play on The Lord of the Rings—you know, for the epic battles and hobbit vibes—and guess who shows up on the couch next to me?
Yeah. God.
Turns out, He’s a huge fan.
But somewhere between Frodo leaving the Shire and Aragorn drawing his sword in slow-mo, things got… deep. Suddenly, we weren’t just watching a movie. We were talking about courage. Sacrifice. Evil that looks tempting. Light that never gives up. And—plot twist—how Tolkien might’ve slipped some eternal truths into the script without anyone noticing (except God, of course).
If you’ve ever felt like Middle-earth speaks to something more, something real, you’re not imagining it. Come sit down, press play, and see The Lord of the Rings like you’ve never seen it before: with popcorn in one hand and the Creator of the universe in the other.
You in?
Buy now on Amazon or on Digital.
The Story Behind the Book
Back in the glorious days of the early 2000s, I ran a gargantuan website called Angels & Elves in which I went through the entire Lord of the Rings film franchise and analyzed every single scene for spiritual depth and insights. My dad started it, by walking out of the film (both of us were Tolkien virgins) and saying, “There’s a lot of Christian symbolism in that movie.” It got me to thinking and I rarely think and don’t act, so I dove into a project that took me five or six years, caused me to rub shoulders with hundreds of Christian LotR fans, and even found me a best friend for fifteen years.
All along, my dad said, “Write a book and sell it,” but I never did, until years later after I had shut down the site and still had about 900,000 words of rich analysis. I wrote this book about five times, and each time ran into a serious problem of it just being… dull. Deep and insightful, but not a fun read. And then one morning, after yet another endless variation, I got up and thought, “What if it played out like a conversation with God?”
Genius. I took it and ran with it.
The audience reactions have been mixed. One person called me “flippant.” (Yeah, I am. God made me that way.) Another said I was the most devout heretic he’d ever met. (Ha, ha, gold.) But, I have never gone back to tone it down, because… this me at my finest. My true personality, full of snark, sarcasm, and sassing the almighty, but also having a deep and aboding love and respect for Him. You will either enjoy it or think less of me, but you won’t come out of it able to watch LotR the same way again. You will look at Sam’s box of salt as a symbol of hope, at Gandalf’s sacrifice as a Christ parallel, as Galadriel giving Gimli three strands of hair instead of one as how the Almighty longs to give us more than we ask for, if we let Him.
I’m proud of this book, both because of the analysis at work behind it and the long road it took to get me to the destination of holding it in my hands.
