Harry Potter and the Subjects the Church Forgot
If you're undecided about whether the Potter books are essentially a 'good thing' or not, then the latest instalment, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, is unlikely to help you make up your mind. No darker than Potter 4 or 5 but much easier to read, it is a funny, engaging tale in which, if anything, Rowling's powers of characterisation are keener than ever.
Whilst the Pope and a number of other Christian commentators regard the series as a portal to the occult, Rowling has constructed a coherent fantasy world that has little, if any connection, with the worldviews or values of real witchcraft or Wicca.
Indeed, the first novel celebrates the willingness of three separate individuals to lay down their lives out of love for others. Similarly, throughout the series, it is not Harry's skill as a wizard that rescues him from death but his courage and loyalty, the sacrificial love of his mother and the selfless help of his friends and teachers.
It is, of course, entirely right that we should carefully critique the work of the most popular author of our age, but sobering that, back in the school room, our children are studying all kinds of often brilliant literary texts - humanist, existentialist, nihilist, materialist and expressly anti-God - with hardly a pamphlet on how to do so through Biblical lenses.
Alas, the Church's rapid engagement with Rowling is not an indicator of a wider engagement with literature or the national curriculum in general. Sadly, it reveals the opposite: we are obsessed with the superficially 'spiritual', the fantasy world of witches and wizards, and have, on the whole, ignored the superficially 'secular' - from Aldous Huxley to Harold Pinter, from the theology of maths to the philosophy of history.
Christ, however, came to reconcile all things to himself - "whether things on earth or things in heaven". (Colossians 1:20) And that includes the ordinary as well as the extraordinary, the world of pots and pans and performance targets, as well as the world of cauldrons (leaky and sound), kettles, and the Care of Magical Creatures.
Mark Greene
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