I've sat with the "mortal must put on immortality" point in 1 Corinthians 15 for a long time. If we already had an immortal soul by nature, that language would be strange. The article lays that out cleanly without turning it into a fight. Still wrestling with how to talk about passages people usually read as intermediate-state proof texts, but the overall frame here (life as God's gift, death as sleep, hope in the resurrection) is the one that keeps lining up when I read the whole story.

I get the point about courage and sacrifice, but I'm still stuck on the magic itself. Even if Tolkien meant it as invented myth, how do you draw a clean line between that and the kinds of occult practices Scripture warns about? Curious how you'd explain that to a teen who loves the movies and is also serious about following Christ.