Here’s something to get your blood pressure up this morning. Toby Young, a freelance writer, gives a series of bare assertions about how sad it is that literature as “second-rate” as Harry Potter has been so successful:

But on the other hand, there’s something depressingly second-rate about the Harry Potter franchise. The books are a bland amalgam of more interesting work by more imaginative authors. The plots are feeble and episodic. And what little interest the characters and stories contain has long ago been eradicated by endless repetition.

Of all Britain’s celebrated children’s authors, JK Rowling is among the least deserving of this honour. Off the top of my head, I can think of half a dozen better candidates — Beatrix Potter, AA Milne, Kenneth Grahame, CS Lewis, Richmal Crompton and Roald Dahl. A hundred years from now, children will still be reading those authors and Harry Potter will be a distant memory.

This is the kind of article that tells us more about its author than the author about whome he is writing. How embarrassing would it be for him and the other condescending commenters there to learn that Potter is being studied as serious literature at over 40 college and university campuses, including many of the Ivy League schools? This man doesn’t know the first thing about these books or about what constitutes great literature.

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Yahoo! states that the Vatican and its official newspaper continue one line of praise of Harry Potter with a positive endorsement of the Half-Blood Prince movie:

The Vatican lauded the latest Harry Potter film on Monday, saying “Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince” made the age-old debate over good vs. evil crystal clear.The Vatican newspaper L’Osservatore Romano even gave two thumbs up to the film’s treatment of adolescent love, saying it achieved the “correct balance” and made the stars more credible to the general audience.

The newspaper said the film, which opens Wednesday, was the best adaptation yet of the J.K. Rowling series about the adventures of the bespectacled child wizard Harry Potter and his Hogwarts chums as they battle Harry’s nemesis, the evil sorcerer Voldemort.

They do qualify their endorsement, arguing that the books show no “explicit ‘reference to the transcendent’.”  (Can’t wait to see how patrons respond to that…)  More than a year ago, L’Osservatore Romano also ran a stringent critique of HP by Edoardo Rialti:

The author recalls Tolkien’s essays about fables, in which he says that “fables can depart from the physical world and the universe created, but not from the moral order: we can imagine a universe illuminated by a green sun, but we cannot bulk to the temptation of presenting as positive a reality in which the moral and spiritual structure are inverted or confused, a world in which evil is good.”

“And this is exactly what happens in Harry Potter,” L’Osservatore says. “Despite several positive values that can be found in the story, at the foundations of this tale is the proposal that of witchcraft as positive, the violent manipulation of things and people thanks to the knowledge of the occult, an advantage of a select few: the ends justify the means because the knowledgeable, the chosen ones, the intellectuals know how to control the dark powers and turn them into good.”

One thing all this makes crystal clear:  If the Vatican feels compelled to offer comment, Harry Potter will continue to draw interest far past its media heyday.

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Ted Hamilton, in “Harry Potter and the End of Literacy,” becomes another apocalyptic voice, citing Harry Potter (and Twilight) as markers of the end of the true art of literature:

It’s not even that books have been abandoned altogether. In fact, there have been some astonishing literary phenomena in recent years that probably represent the largest shared experiences of reading in history. The obvious example is the Harry Potter series, which has sold over 400 million copies in 67 languages. More recently, the Twilight books have gotten a boost from the related movie and are now seen in every teenage girl’s hands. And the seemingly unending hubbub over faux-memoirs and the accountability of authors would seem to suggest that people still care deeply about literature.

But the literature under consideration is of a deeply impoverished sort. Harry Potter and Twilight are good for a quick thrill and an occasional, broad-stroked lesson, but there’s no comparison to true art. At the risk of sounding too high-brow (and my hesitation indicates the extent to which cultural elitism has been discredited), the majority of what people read today is schlock. There’s something to be said for the pleasure of reading Tom Clancy or Dan Brown, I suppose, but their prevalence pushes aside the great authors.

I think Mr. Hamilton is in need of a few reading assignments, perhaps most importantly James W. Thomas’s introduction to Repottting Harry Potter, or his essay by the same name in my forthcoming volume, Hog’s Head Conversations. For a book-length and equally important read, I’d assign him John Granger’s forthcoming book, Harry Potter’s Bookshelf.

The only thing that will contribute to Harry Potter’s being “the end of literacy” is if all the critics like Mr. Hamilton fail to see that rather than detracting from the classics, Ms. Rowling’s novels embrace them, point to them, and make their ideas accessible to postmodern readers.

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We’ve all heard of and discussed the “Harry Haters” out of the fundamentalist Christian camps who think the boy wizard is indoctrinating impressionable young minds into witchcraft.  Another type of Harry Hater is out there, and is just the opposite, claiming that Harry is indoctrinating kids into Christianity.  From Iranian TV:

Iranian state television has come to the conclusion that Harry Potter is a Zionist plot. The documentary, which you can watch here, features several “experts” discussing the wildly popular series of books and movies.

One of the experts quoted in the documentary says that Harry Potter is part of a “cultural crusade” and through the movies “they [Zionists] are indirectly saying: ‘join us.’”

The documentary, which shows many of the darker scenes from the series, concludes that elements of the Kabbalah are presented in the movies. One expert says that Harry Potter is portrayed as the Messiah and the film touches on Armadeggon, which he says fits into popular Christian Zionist beliefs.

In 2007, Iran’s ultra-conservative daily “Kayhan” called Harry Potter “a billion-dollar Zionist project” and a “destructive bomb” for children’s minds. It alleged that the author J.K. Rowling had links to Zionists and that was how she became so well known.

I’d heard about this before, but this is the first time I’ve ever read a genuine report about it. Fascinating. Either Harry’s anti-Christian, or he is the culprit behind a Christian takeover.

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OK, so that’s not really happening.  But my book, Harry Potter & Imagination: The Way Between Two Worlds, opens with a chapter on the importance of mythological and fairy-tale thinking as opposed to what G.K. Chesterton called “scientific fatalism.”  Richard Dawkins has decided to write the opposite book, positing the possibility that fairy tales are potentially dangerous, because they teach children anti-scientific, magical thinking.  

The prominent atheist is stepping down from his post at Oxford University to write a book aimed at youngsters in which he will warn them against believing in “anti-scientific” fairytales.

Prof Hawkins said: “The book I write next year will be a children’s book on how to think about the world, science thinking contrasted with mythical thinking.

“I haven’t read Harry Potter, I have read Pullman who is the other leading children’s author that one might mention and I love his books. I don’t know what to think about magic and fairy tales.”

Prof Dawkins said he wanted to look at the effects of “bringing children up to believe in spells and wizards”.

“I think it is anti-scientific – whether that has a pernicious effect, I don’t know,” he told More4 News.

“I think looking back to my own childhood, the fact that so many of the stories I read allowed the possibility of frogs turning into princes, whether that has a sort of insidious affect on rationality, I’m not sure. Perhaps it’s something for research.”

Thoughts?  I happen to think that stories about frogs turning into princes are good for children (and adults!), so if someone wants to arrange the debate, I’d be glad to oblige.  Since that’s highly unlikely to happen, stay tuned for a couple months focusing on fairy tales and mythical thinking, what J.K. Rowling calls, learning to “imagine better,” and pay close attention to this site and Zossima.com for news on the release of Harry Potter & Imagination.

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The story of “The Haunter of the Dark” begins with a teenage Robert Bloch, who went on in adulthood to win the Hugo, Bram Stoker, and World Fantasy Awards and become best known for his novel Psycho.

As Bloch explains in “Time-Traveling with H.P. Lovecraft”:

In 1935 I’d written a story, “The Shambler from the Stars,” dedicated to Lovecraft, in which he appeared as a character. A year later he returned the compliment in “The Haunter of the Dark,” dedicated to me and using me as a character…. At the time his tale was published I found it oddly disconcerting to read about myself, thinly-disguised as young “Robert Blake,” traveling from my real-life home at 620 East Knapp Street in Milwaukee to take up residence in Lovecraft’s real-life home where I spent a fictional life — and met a fictional death — in the very study where the actual story had been written.

Indeed, the house in which Lovecraft wrote and set the story still stands.

You can see pictures of it here, here, and here in my virtual walking tour of Lovecraft’s Providence.

* What is your reaction to “The Haunter of the Dark”? What do you think of the idea Kenneth Hite has suggested, that the Trapezphedron is a kind of Grail? (“It’s found in a Perilous Chapel, which seems to exist in an Otherworld… by a young and inexperienced quester who doesn’t even know what he’s looking for….” who “gains wisdom from an old man” and “achieves the Grail, being adopted into its lineage and taken into the Otherworld.”) Or maybe it’s an “anti-Grail,” since a trapezohedron is the opposite of a prism, drawing in color to create darkness rather than producing illumination. And rather than ascending into heaven, it is dropped into the deepest channel of the sea. What do you think?

* Now to bring our Lovecraft conversation full circle back to our discussion of “The Outsider.” Robert Bloch notes in his reminiscence about “The Haunter of the Dark” the issue of Lovecraft’s identity and the issue of identity in Lovecraft’s writing:

If indeed he was the epitome of his own story-character, “The Outsider” — a creature who realized self-identity only when finally confronted with his revolting image in a mirror — then possibly we cannot discern his nature clearly through all the well-meaning or ill-meaning examinations of his life and work. We must seek out that same mirror to catch a glimpse of his true being; stare at the many-faceted, many-faced reflection or reality that was Howard Phillips Lovecraft.

Look closely, and you’ll see yourself.

So… what do you think?

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Well, it’s been a really exciting Banned Books Week, as I’ve managed to get up just one post.  I got completely buried in work this week, missed both of my classes as well as both of the assignments for those classes.

As Banned Books Week wraps up, I’ll toss out another interesting conversation for discussion: Why has Harry Potter been so frequently challenged?  (By “challenged,” I mean, “attempted to ban”).  Is it really a genuine belief that the books are going to lead kids into the occult?  Or is there something underlying that belief?  Here are a few suggestions on my part.  You can run with these or suggest your own.

• Culture-War Christianity – There is a certain segment of Christianity that seems to always be at war with something in culture. They tend to be defined primarily by what they’re against, as opposed to what they’re for.  These moral crusaders need a cause, and the popularity of Harry Potter made it a prime target.
• Spiritual-Warfare Christianity – There is another segment of Christianity that tends to find evil spiritual forces dangerously at work in everything.  Harry Potter became something that would not just negatively affect the minds of young children, but something that would actually put them in contact with demons.
• Anti-Sacramentalism – I think lying beneath these two is a loss of belief in a relationship between the physical and the spiritual.  In other words, gnosticism.  Because symbols don’t really communicate spiritual grace in an anti-sacramentalist belief system, the Christian symbols of Harry Potter were never enough to convince them of its Christian content.  They are biblical literalists in the strictest sense of the term, leading to the belief that the “witches” and “wizards” in Harry Potter couldn’t have been anything other than the magicians condemned in the Scriptures, because those words have “objective” meanings.  For Harry Potter to have been approved by an anti-sacramentalist, Harry would have to have been an explicit Christian in the story, with a gospel conversion and all, and Voldemort would have been the leader of some Satanic cult.  

Your thoughts on these or other reasons and much appreciated!

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Thanks to everyone who has been participating in the great discussions of Sorcerer’s Stone Week!  I’m hoping to catch up with them and join them soon.  We’re transitioning now into Banned Books Week, which begins today.  I won’t be doing a “Day 1,” “Day 2,” etc. like with this past week.  But be sure to visit often for frequent material this week on Banned Books.

As we all know, our beloved Harry Potter books have been challenged and banned, and at least a few of these challenges have gotten a lot of attention.  So this is a topic that is close to the heart of the Harry Potter fan.  

Here’s some introductory reading material on banned books to get your week started:

• Banned Books Online – history and links to banned books
• List of Banned Books at Wikipedia
• Doris’s blog at Leaky is covering Banned Books Week (Doris is also a Pub patron)

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by Travis

We’ve had a good amount of discussion here about the term “fundamentalism” as it applies to Christian anti-Potter crowd. There’s been some disagreement about what the term means. This post might help clarify what I mean when I use the term. Some time ago, I began writing some satire of fundamentalism at my other site. In one of those satires, I wrote the following. The scene takes place as the pastor of a fundamentalist church (“Pastor Funk”) has made a house call to try to evangelize “Fred” -

“I see that there’s a copy of Harry Potter on your bookshelf,” Pastor Funk said. “Did you know the Bible says that witches should be killed? Did you know that there really are demons, and that witches are always conjuring up demons, and that if your children continue to read books influenced by the occult, you could bring demonic influence into this very house?” …

“Here’s a few gospel tracts about the evils of Harry Potter….”

Fred glanced over at his book shelf. Six Harry Potter novels were neatly stacked there…but wait…did he just see one of them move a little? No, his eyes were playing tricks on him. But then again, he and his wife had just finished reading the series to the boys for the third time, and the boys were acting very oddly lately. Chuck, in his last hockey game, had accidently shot the puck into his own goal. And Bill had spilled milk on the floor three times this week. Could demons be turning them into little mentally deranged boys who couldn’t perform simple tasks?

Alas, my satire has become reality. Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone went undercover at a “Christian” retreat of a very popular, nationally-known church, and the retreat’s leader (Fortenberry) told the following story:

Fortenberry told a story about a nephew of his who called him up one night. “Both of his kids had fallen on the ground in respiratory distress, half-conscious, writhing around, gasping for air,” Fortenberry said. “And I said to my nephew, I said, ‘It isn’t something they’ve done. It’s something you’ve done.’ ”

The crowd murmured in assent.

“I told my nephew to look around the house,” Fortenberry continued. “I said, ‘Do you have a copy of Harry Potter?’ And he said yes. And I said, ‘That’s your problem.’ So I told him to go get that copy of that book, tear it in half and throw it out the window. So he does it, and guess what? Both of those kids stood up completely recovered, just like that.”

He snapped his fingers, indicating the speed with which the kids had jumped up in recovery. The crowd cooed and applauded. I frowned, wondering for a minute what life must be like for a person mortally afraid of toothless commercial fairy tales. It struck me that Phil Fortenberry’s nephew was probably more afraid of Harry Potter than Macbeth, which to me said a lot about this religion and about America in general.

Scary.

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by Johnny

I received an early morning surprise yesterday as I checked this site and clicked on the link to MTV News where J.K. Rowling opened up about the Christian content in the Harry Potter novels. I do have to say that it was inevitable. JKR told Evan Solomon in July 2000, “[T]here is so much I would like to say, and come back when I’ve written book seven.” Or how about Ernest Tucker who wrote in October 1999 that “Rowling, aware of the protest, said she couldn’t answer the questions about the book’s religious content until the conclusion of book seven”?

And now she has done it. JKR goes so far as to say that, at least to her, the religious parallels have “always been obvious.” More important, however, are her comments regarding the scriptures found on the tombstones of Kendra/Ariana Dumbledore (“Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” found in Matthew 6:21; not 6:19 as the article asserts) and James/Lily Potter (“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death” found in 1 Corinthians 15:26) in the last novel:

“They’re very British books, so on a very practical note Harry was going to find biblical quotations on tombstones,” Rowling explained. “[But] I think those two particular quotations he finds on the tombstones at Godric’s Hollow, they sum up — they almost epitomize the whole series.”

This is important because these “biblical quotations” form the foundation for a series that has been maligned by “Harry Haters” for reflecting anti-Christian values or the likes of Lev Grossman who see them as devoid of any religion for that matter.

The context of Matthew 6:21 deals with Jesus commanding his followers to store up treasures in heaven for your treasure reflects where your heart is. The most obvious example is Albus Dumbledore who knew this scripture too well and was filled with remorse over his obsession over the Deathly Hallows, thereby neglecting his family. His heart was not in the right place, because he was seeking earthly treasures. In the series as a whole, we see various characters’ “treasures” being a reflection of their hearts. From Voldemort to his Death Eaters to even Professor Quirrell, Lockhart, and Umbridge, we see that their treasures reflected the poverty in their own hearts. The treasures of greed and hate lead to opening yourself to possession, exploitation, torture, racism, and murder. For someone like Harry Potter, his treasure was the desire for a family and is reflected in his bravery and self sacrifice because of his love for his friends, whom he saw as his only family since his parents were murdered.

The context of 1 Corinthians 15:26 is as the article says is “one of the central foundations of resurrection theology.” It also reflects the theme of death that pervades the whole series. The series starts with Harry Potter orphaned because of the murder of his parents by Voldemort, and as the series progresses, more beloved characters die as casualties in the war. This theme of death is reflected in JKR’s own thoughts on the loss of her mother over a decade ago. She told Meredith Vieira back in July that:

Definitely, Mum dying had a profound influence on the books, because I had been writing about Harry for 6 months when she died. And on the first draft, his parents were disposed off really quiet and at an almost cavalier fashion. 6 months, and my mother dies, and I really think from that moment on, Death became a central, if not the central theme of the seven books. And, ummm, in many ways, all of my characters are defined by their attitude to death and the possibility of death.

This is why the scene of Harry seeing his parents and family in the Mirror of Erised was her favorite in the first novel. The greater implications of Paul’s words are the concept of a life after death, something that JKR struggles with:

“The truth is that, like Graham Greene, my faith is sometimes that my faith will return. It’s something I struggle with a lot,” she revealed. “On any given moment if you asked me [if] I believe in life after death, I think if you polled me regularly through the week, I think I would come down on the side of yes — that I do believe in life after death. [But] it’s something that I wrestle with a lot. It preoccupies me a lot, and I think that’s very obvious within the books.”

JKR mentions Graham Greene, who was a Catholic and the author of such works as The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, Brighton Rock, among others. I never read any of his works but several of his novels reflected one’s struggle with faith. Greene said at one time, “If you have abandoned one faith, do not abandon all faith. There is always an alternative to the faith we lose. Or is it the same faith under another mask?” Another time he said in an interview, “I don’t like conventional religious piety. I’m more at ease with the Catholicism of Catholic countries. I’ve always found it difficult to believe in God. I suppose I’d now call myself a Catholic atheist.”

JKR reflects that Greene’s struggle is her struggle and we can say that the Harry Potter novels reflect JKR’s own internal struggle dealing with such issues as death and life after death. This of course is very honest of JKR. Of course every Christian struggle one way or the other and it is these struggles that bring us closer to our faith rather than ceasing it. John Granger commented on this “struggle” in JKR’s interview with Meredith Vieira by saying:

Ms. Rowling has told her that her “struggling with religious beliefs and so on” are “quite evident” in Deathly Hallows. And they are. But this is not the struggle of a skeptic or of a school child who is beginning to re-examine mechanically held beliefs. This is the agony of the agnostic who knows that there is no knowing for certain rationally but that not believing has consequences and belief in many ways is always a choice. Seeing what happens to those who choose not to believe, or, to use another word Ms. Rowling contrasts Harry and Voldemort with, those who choose not to trust, Harry chooses to believe and to trust.

In the end, if I am interpreting JKR’s words correctly, we can see that despite her struggles, she, like Harry, chooses to believe and to trust. The MTV News article says what John Granger, Travis Prinzi, and others have known all along: that there is Christian content in the Harry Potter series and that JKR is a Christian herself. This news was a delight simply because JKR said that she would elaborate only after the series has concluded (I’m hoping this will be the first of many of JKR’s discussions on this). It only added to what we already read in the last novel because as JKR said, “You’ll have read it.”

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