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Also (this is way off the subject), how long do any of you think it's been since a movie with no swearing, immoral sex scenes, or off color jokes has won best film at the Acadamy Awards? I'm thinking a very long time and... it's about time.

Come to Me, all you who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Matthew 11:28
I think this verse falls right into what we're talking about

"What is temptation? Temptation is the gracious way of introducing each soul to his or her power. When you are seduced or threatened by external circumstances, you lose power. They gain power over you. With each choice
that you make to align yourself with the energy of your soul, you empower yourself. This is how authentic power is acquired. It is built up step by step, choice by choice. The journey to the soul begins with understanding that we are drawn automatically as a species to come to terms with power. Each human being is experiencing the causes and effects of his (and even his forfathers') choices, his or her desires to fill in the empty, powerless places within
him or her. This dynamic can be described in terms of an insecure humanity, but that is just the obvious. The mechanism at work is the journey toward genuine, authentic empowerment. This is why each human being struggles so deeply with power: the lack of it, the acquisition of it, what it is really, how one should have it. Underlying every crisis, emotional, spiritual, physical and psychological, is the issue of power. Depending upon the lens that you wear to interpret your crisis, you will either step closer to your soul or closer to Earth.
The journey to wholeness requires that you look honestly, openly and with courage into yourself, into the dynamics that lie behind what you feel, what you perceive, what you value, and how you act. It is a journey through your defenses and beyond so that you can experience consciously the nature of
your personality, face what it has produced in your life, and choose to change that."

Actually, I think the thread was intended to ask how the story affected people spiritually, not what the Professor intended it to mean. In reality, no one really knows what an author intends except the author. That's why I find it somewhat amusing in literary analysis when people say "The author intended..." Did the author say he or she meant that? Did the person making this statement talk to the author? We can extrapolate till the cows come home what things may or may not mean or represent in a story, but only the person whose mind it came from can really say what the true intent was.

If a story touches people in a certain way, then the author has succeeded. Let us not digress from the thread topic. This is not meant to be what Tolkien intended by his stories, but how they affected you spiritually. So far, mostly Christians have answered, but it touches many more than just those, thus the wide variety of belief systems you'll find on this board.

That said, LoTR definitely affected me spiritually. It made me believe in the inherent strength of people when faced with overwhelming odds and that hope remains even in the darkest hours.

"A wizard is never late, Frodo Baggins, nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to."

The spiritual question is huge. This work is spiritual in many ways. some that fit in the obvious Christian format but also in other ways. I could write a book on spiritual themes in LOTR (and other have done so) but her are some that stand out:

For instance, it abounds with spiritual and deeply psychological patterns that are seen throughout al the mythology and religion of all cultures (Carl Jung called them archetypes) are everywhere- the Wise Old Man, the Golden Child, the Hidden King, the Goddess of Light, the Evil Child, the Shadow Wizard..... So it was great to feel and see those characters, those basic building blockes of our psychological perception.