101 to study C.S. Lewis through the lens of leadership, focusing on how he demonstrated distinct attributes of leadership through his letterwriting. As you might guess, in the course of those investigations I frequently bumped into Tolkien, who was not only a friend and colleague of Lewis but was also an avid letter-writer himself. And, while every good Tolkien scholar warns against conflating Lewis and Tolkien, it is important nonetheless to understand that they did indeed share common sympathies, concerns, and hobbies even though they were quite distinct characters.1 One of the common causes between the two was that both were committed to the study of language through literature instead of separating the two into detached wings of study. Tom Shippey, once a student at Cambridge during the last years of C.S. Lewis’ tenure who has since also become a well-known Tolkien scholar, has an excellent chapter on this common cause that united both men in their professional careers as Oxford dons.2 As I read through this chapter it occurred to me that the field of leadership also suffers from a similar separation. While Lewis and Tolkien were upset that the study of language was being reduced because of its separation from literature, I have also seen how the field of leadership has experienced reduction from its severance from literature. There are of course many examples of connection between the two fields, but at a macro level the training and teaching of leadership remains much more tilted towards the pragmatic, to skill-based competency rather than towards the humanities and virtue formation. The overemphasis on pragmatism reduces leadership studies. Part of this reduction is due to the general cultural reductionism that has occurred in the last three centuries. D.C. Schindler, in his book Love and the Postmodern Condition, argues that love has been reduced to mere subjective sentiment.3 Elizabeth Lasch-Quinn, in her book Ars Vitae points to a similar reduction of soul to self. She says that our contemporary “culture of sophistry” has a “fascination with style over substance” and has thus twisted the examined life into one of unexamined self-referentialism.4 Charles Taylor, in The Secular Age, notes the reduction of our view of the world around us. He says we have gone from seeing it as a cosmos of unity and order to now seeing “NOLO EPISCOPARI AND THE LEADERSHIP WISDOM OF J.R.R. TOLKIEN”
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