Faith & Fantasy

What if the stories we tell about magic are really about faith? Fantasy isn’t just about dragons, quests, and enchanted worlds. Beneath the spells and swords lies something deeper — the language of belief itself. This series explores how the world’s great religious traditions shape the stories we tell about wonder, power, destiny, and hope — and how those stories, in turn, help us see faith anew. Across seven episodes, we travel through the mythic landscapes where religion and imagination meet. We’ll see how Christian ideas of sacrifice and kingship shape Narnia and Arthurian legend, how the Buddhist and Daoist search for enlightenment powers Journey to the West, how Scheherazade’s stories of survival in Arabian Nights echo Islamic ideas of justice and trust, how Hindu epics infuse comics and cinema with cosmic order, and how Jewish stories from the Golem to The Red Tent turn words and memory into acts of endurance. Each episode unpacks how fantasy defamiliarizes the sacred — making old truths feel new again. And in the final reflection, we ask whether fantasy has become faith’s last language: not an escape from reality, but a way of returning to its deepest questions. The series concludes with a live session — Do You Have to Believe to Write Believably? — where we look at authors like Salman Rushdie and Philip Pullman, who use fantasy to question, resist, and reinvent the traditions they inherit. Whether you’re a reader of myth and literature, a seeker of meaning, or simply someone who loves a good story, Faith & Fantasy will change the way you read the worlds we imagine — and the beliefs they carry within them.