In 1977, something broke open in the hearts of a generation of young men. What was it?

Before Star Wars, that generation didn't have a name for the ache: the sense that you're living the wrong life, farming moisture when you were built for something else. Luke Skywalker gave it a shape. A grumpy uncle. A binary sunset. A name that didn't fit the life he'd been handed.

This is the first episode in our new three-part series on the Original Trilogy. JP traces three ideas buried in the first film that still hit as hard as they did in 1977: the ache of longing, the terrifying weight of destiny, and George Lucas's own surprising conviction that none of it means anything without faith. Along the way: what Obi-Wan's death actually costs him, why C-3PO is the first one to see who Luke really is, and what it means to stand at the end of your life and see the difference between who you were and who you could have been.

Part of our series working through the stories that shape us at Story Chapel, a Sunday morning gathering in Cincinnati where we read fantasy, sci-fi, and mythology looking for the Gospel hiding inside the story.

You don't need to believe anything to belong here. Just bring your curiosity.

What if the wisest person you know has never had an original abstract thought in his life?

Farmer Maggot barely appears in the movies. In the books, he's a gruff, dog-owning, trespasser-hating farmer who Frodo is more scared of than the Black Riders themselves. Tolkien could have cut him from the story entirely and lost nothing of the plot.

So why didn't he?

The last session in our Forgotten Characters series argues that Farmer Maggot is Tolkien's answer to a question we still haven't figured out: what's the difference between being smart and being wise? JP traces it through Proverbs, through Gandalf's own words about Saruman, and through a character who never once reasons his way to anything; he just knows, in his bones, how the world actually works.

Part of our series working through the characters of The Lord of the Rings at Story Chapel, a Sunday morning gathering in Cincinnati where we read fantasy, sci-fi, and mythology looking for the Gospel hiding inside the story.

You don't need to believe anything to belong here. Just bring your curiosity.

Can an elf lord teach you how to see?

There's a moment in The Lord of the Rings that most readers rush past. Frodo, wounded and fading, looks across a river and sees something no one else can see: a figure of pure white light, while everyone around him, even Strider, even the hobbits, appears only as a shadow.

That figure is Glorfindel. And the question this session asks is simple: what did Frodo actually see, and what would change if we saw people that way too?

Part two of our three-part series, The Forgotten Characters of The Fellowship of the Ring. JP traces Glorfindel back through the fall of the hidden city of Gondolin, into a conversation about the border between the physical and spiritual world, and lands somewhere unexpected: an old idea from C.S. Lewis that there are no ordinary people, only immortals we joke with, work with, and forget to notice.

Part of our series working through the characters of The Lord of the Rings at Story Chapel, a Sunday morning gathering in Cincinnati where we read fantasy, sci-fi, and mythology looking for the Gospel hiding inside the story.

You don't need to believe anything to belong here. Just bring your curiosity.

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"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth." We say it like it's settled. But look around at who actually holds the power, and it's hard to believe.

In the first episode of Story Chapel, we go looking for an answer in one of the strangest, most forgotten characters in The Lord of the Rings: Tom Bombadil. He's older than the river and the trees, he skips through the forest worried about his flowers, and he's the only one in Middle-earth the Ring cannot touch. What he reveals about the difference between being meek and being weak might change how you read that line for good.

Story Chapel is where we find the beauty and truth hidden in the stories that move us. Not a church service. Just a good story, and the questions it opens.