Holly Ordway is the Cardinal Francis George Professor of Faith and Culture at the Word on Fire Institute, and Visiting Professor of Apologetics at Houston Christian University. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and an MA in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a subject editor for the Journal of Inklings Studies and an Associate Member of the Oxford Tolkien Network.
She is the author of Tolkien’s Faith: A Spiritual Biography and the award-winning Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-earth Beyond the Middle Ages.
Her other writing includes, as editor As Kingfishers Catch Fire: Selected and Annotated Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and chapters on C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien to volumes such as Tolkien Among the Theologians, Life on the Silent Planet: Essays in Christian Living from C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy, C.S. Lewis in Poets’ Corner, The Inklings and King Arthur, and C.S. Lewis’s List.
Her recent academic article “What Did Tolkien Really Think About Narnia?” appears in the peer-reviewed Sehnsucht: The C.S. Lewis Journal, Volume 19, Issue 2 (2026), from which it can be downloaded for free.
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