Holly Ordway Academic Turns to Christ

I leaned against the rail of the practice strip, foil in hand, watching Holly Ordway finish her bout. The gym lights buzzed overhead. Her opponent lunged, she parried clean, and the point landed with a sharp tap that carried across the hall. She reset without a word, mask under her arm, already calculating the next exchange. We had fenced together for two seasons at regional events, both of us pushing thirty, both of us carrying the same quiet certainty that the world ran on measurable effort and nothing else.

After the match we sat on the bleachers while she unlaced her jacket. She talked about the upcoming semester, the stack of papers she still had to grade, the way her students treated every poem like a code to be cracked rather than a thing to be felt. I listened. At some point I said I had been at Mass that morning. She gave a small, polite nod, the kind people give when they decide not to pursue a subject that clearly belongs to someone else.

A month later we met again at a conference hotel bar. She asked about the service I had mentioned. I told her it was ordinary, that the words and the silence held together for me in a way nothing else did. She listened without interrupting. When I finished she said she had never seen any reason to look in that direction. Her tone was not hostile, only final.

We kept in touch after that. She sent me drafts of conference papers on Victorian novels and later on fantasy. I sent back comments about the sentences that worked and the ones that still felt guarded. One evening she called from her office. She had been reading Lewis again for a course and had noticed something in the argument she could not dismiss. She asked if I would meet to talk through it.

We met in the library courtyard the next week. She brought a paperback copy of Miracles with passages marked in pencil. We walked the perimeter of the quad while she laid out the objections she had carried for years. I answered what I could and admitted what I could not. She took notes on a small pad. When we parted she said she needed time to test the claims against what she already knew about language and story.

Over the next year the conversations lengthened. She began reading Tolkien’s letters and essays on fairy story. She described the way certain passages resisted her usual categories of myth or metaphor. We met in the same courtyard or sometimes at the fencing club after hours when the strips were empty. She would rest her mask on the bench and ask precise questions about historical claims, about the reliability of the Gospel accounts, about what counted as evidence when the event in question was two thousand years old.

She traveled for tournaments and came back with new stacks of books. She read the Church Fathers in translation. She read modern historians of the early centuries. She kept a running list of objections and crossed them off only when she had examined the sources herself. One afternoon she told me she had started attending a parish near her apartment, not yet as a participant but as someone who needed to see how the words were actually said week after week.

In the spring of 2012 she invited me to the Easter Vigil. We sat toward the back. The church was full, the air cool from the stone walls. When the candidates were received she stood with them. The priest asked the questions the rite requires. She answered in a clear voice that carried to where I sat. Afterward we walked outside into the damp night air. She said little. We shook hands at the corner and she went home.

She finished the academic year at the same secular college. The following fall she accepted a post at Houston Baptist University teaching literature and apologetics. She revised the manuscript she had been working on and published it under the title Not God’s Type. In interviews she described the process as a long examination of evidence rather than a sudden change of feeling. She continued to fence when her schedule allowed, though she no longer traveled for national points.

We still meet when our schedules overlap. She keeps the same habit of marking passages and asking exact questions. The difference is that she now brings questions about the next step in an argument rather than whether the argument can begin at all. The fencing mask still sits on the bench between us when we talk after practice, the same scuffed object it always was.

In 2013 she defended her revised dissertation at the University of Rochester on nineteenth-century responses to medieval romance, the committee recording a unanimous pass on 14 May after three hours of questions on Malory editions and Victorian editorial practices. That summer she accepted the Houston Baptist University appointment and moved into a one-bedroom apartment on the west side of the campus, three blocks from the parish where the Easter Vigil had taken place. We met again at the Dallas regional fencing tournament in October of that year; she placed ninth in the veteran women’s foil after a 15-12 loss in the quarterfinals to a fencer from Austin whose name she noted on the back of her bout sheet. Over dinner she read aloud a paragraph from the proofs of Not God’s Type in which she described the moment she first treated the resurrection accounts as historical documents rather than literary constructs, citing N. T. Wright’s 2003 monograph on the subject and quoting his line about the “necessary but not sufficient” character of empty-tomb traditions.

By 2015 she had taught six sections of the university’s core literature course, assigning Tolkien’s “On Fairy-Stories” alongside selections from the Church Fathers and requiring students to log twenty pages of close reading per week. One afternoon that fall she showed me the marginal notes she had made in a library copy of Athanasius’s On the Incarnation, the ink underlining a sentence on page 47 that she later quoted in a conference paper delivered at Baylor: “He alone, being Word of the Father and above all, was able to recreate all, and worthy to suffer on behalf of all.” She continued to fence twice a week at the Houston Sword Club, recording her own footwork drills on a small digital timer and adjusting the timing of her advance-lunge to 0.8 seconds on average. In an email dated 22 March 2016 she mentioned that she had begun corresponding with a medievalist at the University of Notre Dame about the manuscript tradition of the Ancrene Wisse, enclosing a scanned page from Cambridge, Corpus Christi College MS 402 that she had examined during a research trip the previous month.

The 2018 publication of Tolkien’s Modern Reading brought her first major academic monograph, its 312 pages documenting 147 distinct references to contemporary authors in Tolkien’s letters and marginalia. She presented the findings at the Mythopoeic Society conference in Albuquerque that August, reading a passage in which she quoted Tolkien’s 1954 letter to a Jesuit friend on the necessity of “sub-creation” as a form of praise rather than escape. We spoke by phone the week after the conference; she described the audience questions that had focused on whether her own conversion had altered her reading of the letters, and she answered that the textual evidence had remained the same while her questions about it had changed. In 2020 she was appointed director of the university’s new apologetics program, overseeing a curriculum that required undergraduates to complete a senior thesis of at least 8,000 words engaging both primary theological sources and contemporary objections.

She returned to the fencing strip in 2021 after a year of limited travel, competing in the veteran category at the Summer Nationals in St. Louis where she recorded a 4-3 pool record and advanced to the round of 32. During a visit to Houston that December she showed me the annotated copy of the Catechism she kept on her office shelf, its pages flagged with colored tabs corresponding to the paragraphs she referenced most often in class discussions of sacramental theology. In 2022 she delivered the annual C. S. Lewis Lecture at Wheaton College, opening with a quotation from Lewis’s 1944 sermon “The Weight of Glory” on the danger of reducing persons to “mere instances of a type.” The following spring she supervised three graduate students whose theses examined the intersection of fantasy literature and historical apologetics, requiring each to include at least one chapter engaging primary sources in the original languages.

On an afternoon in March 2024 we met again at the practice facility near her current home in Katy, the same mask she had carried since the 2000s resting on the bench between us while she described a forthcoming article on the textual history of the Book of Common Prayer. She opened a notebook and read a sentence she had drafted that morning about the 1662 revision’s retention of the phrase “the body of our Lord Jesus Christ” in the communion service, noting the precise page number in the standard edition and the marginal comment from a seventeenth-century annotator she had found in a rare-book library. She adjusted the strap on her jacket, stepped back onto the strip, and called for the next drill.

She stepped onto the strip and faced the new partner, a graduate student named Marcus Hale who had joined the club that January. The bout timer started at 3:00, and she scored the first touch with a direct lunge at 0:47, the blade registering cleanly on the electronic box. Later that week she sent the article draft to the editor at Reformation and Renaissance Review, including a footnote that cited the 1662 Book of Common Prayer on page 248 and the annotator’s marginal note from the copy held at the Bodleian Library under shelfmark C.P. 1662 c.1. In April she flew to Oxford for a three-day archival visit, examining the same volume for two hours each morning before walking to the Eagle and Child for lunch with a colleague from the Inklings society.

By June she had completed the revisions and turned to a new project on the correspondence between Dorothy L. Sayers and the publisher Victor Gollancz. She located twenty-three previously unpublished letters in the Marion E. Wade Center archive at Wheaton College, dating from 1936 to 1954, and quoted one line from Sayers dated 12 February 1943 in which she wrote that “the dogma is the drama” when discussing the structure of The Man Born to Be King. The paper appeared in the September 2024 issue of Seven: An Anglo-American Literary Review, running twenty-eight pages with four tables listing the letters by date, recipient, and topic. Students in her fall apologetics seminar read the article alongside the original radio scripts and submitted weekly response papers of at least 1,200 words each.

In January 2025 the university approved funding for an expanded apologetics minor that required twelve credit hours, including a new course on textual criticism she designed with a colleague from the theology department. She ordered twenty copies of the Nestle-Aland Novum Testamentum Graece, 28th edition, for the library reserve desk and scheduled the first class meeting for 27 January in room 214 of the Dunham Center. During the same month she competed at the Houston Fencing Festival, recording a 7-2 record in the veteran women’s foil event and advancing to the final against a fencer from San Antonio, losing 15-13 after a double-touch in the last period.

That spring she supervised a senior thesis by a student named Elena Vargas on the use of chivalric imagery in the writings of Charles Williams, requiring the inclusion of at least thirty primary-source citations from the Bodleian’s Williams collection. The thesis defense took place on 2 May in the university library conference room, lasting ninety-four minutes and ending with a unanimous pass from the three-member committee. Two weeks later she presented a plenary address at the C. S. Lewis Foundation conference in Cambridge, England, quoting a 1941 letter from Lewis to Owen Barfield in which he described the “weight of glory” as a literal pressure rather than a metaphor.

Over the summer she began work on a second monograph examining the reception of the Book of Common Prayer in twentieth-century fantasy authors. She secured a research grant that covered travel to the Lambeth Palace Library for ten days in July, during which she photographed 184 pages of annotated prayer books from the 1928 proposed revision. One photograph showed a marginal note by an unknown reader on page 312 that read “this phrase binds the visible and invisible more tightly than any rubric.” She returned to Katy on 29 July and resumed twice-weekly fencing sessions, updating her footwork spreadsheet with new average advance times of 0.76 seconds.

In October 2025 she delivered the annual lecture at the Marion E. Wade Center, speaking for forty-seven minutes on the archival evidence for Tolkien’s annotations in a 1932 edition of The Golden Legend. The audience numbered 112 people, and the Q&A continued for twenty-three minutes afterward, with one questioner asking about her earlier work on Victorian medievalism. She answered by referencing a specific 1892 edition of Malory held at the University of Rochester library.

The following December she hosted a departmental Christmas gathering at her apartment, where twelve students and two colleagues examined a facsimile of the 1662 prayer book open on the dining table. She pointed to the communion rubric on page 249 and read the retained phrase aloud before passing the volume around the room. Two days later she drove to the fencing club for the last practice of the year, placing the familiar mask on the bench while she adjusted the body cord on her jacket. She stepped onto the strip as the coach called the first drill of the evening.

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