The Rev. John Wm. Houghton, Ph.D., made his first (and so far only) appearance on national television as part of his prep school’s catapult team, when NBC covered Culver Military Academy’s epic struggle with a rival from Indianapolis. A sixth-generation Hoosier who grew up in the town of Culver (founded by his cousins in 1844), Houghton is an Episcopal priest and prize-winning medieval historian who holds degrees from Harvard, Indiana, Yale and Notre Dame. He is the Firestone Endowment Chaplain and Chair of the Department of Religious Studies and Philosophy at The Hill School in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, where he teaches ethics, theology and English. A Fellow of the Episcopal Church Foundation, he has published scholarly articles on topics ranging from liturgy to art history; he serves on the editorial boards of Mythlore and The Journal of Tolkien Research, writes regularly for Tolkien Studies, was Editor-in-Chief of Tolkien in the New Century: Essays in Honor of Tom Shippey (McFarland, 2014), and contributed to The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism (1995), Tolkien the Medievalist (Routledge, 2003) and J.R.R. Tolkien Encyclopedia: Scholarship and Critical Assessment (Taylor and Francis, 2007). While at Indiana, he studied creative writing with poet Roger Mitchell, and later served on the editorial staff of River Styx magazine; he published a collection of his own poetry, Falconry and Other Poems, in 2003.