The first talk, “The Fountain Told a Lie,” went very well, I think. The response was quite good, and to the many of you who asked for a copy of it – I’m over halfway done typing it out, and I’ll have it completed by the end of the month. It will appear here at this site as soon as I’m finished! I’ll also most likely be putting it into a podcast form.
I’m ready for talk #2, “Voldemort: Shadow, Sociopath, Sinner,” and I’m really excited about it and less nervous than I was for yesterday’s talk.
With all of his planning and writing, I haven’t had as much time as I’d like to hear other presentations. I did get to John’s presentation this morning on the Christian Meaning of Deathly Hallows, which was masterfully done. He took Rowling’s statement about her “struggle to believe,” and he paralleled it to Harry’s struggle to believe Dumbledore and his finally setting his trust in him while digging Dobby’s grave, and following through with that trust in the face of doubts and apparent evidence to the contrary. Brilliantly done, and I hope he’ll post it at his blog soon. My wife and I are heading out to dinner with him later this evening.
I met a few fellow Rochesterians yesterday, and Tricia and I had dinner with them last night. One of them, along with a friend and colleague from Phoenix, are coming to the end of a book project on Harry Potter and Law. If you’re reading this, here are the links I told you about, courtesy of Dr. Amy H. Sturgis:
University of Tennessee Professor of Law Benjamin Barton has written about the “real Libertarian bent” of the series. I recommend his article “Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy” from the Michigan Law Review, in which he argues, “Rowling may do more for libertarianism than anyone since John Stuart Mill.”
The Harry Potter and the Law issue of Texas Wesleyan Law Review is now online, as well. A standout among its many excellent articles is “Making Legal Space for Moral Choice” by Andy Morriss of Case Western Reserve University School of Law. The essays are also available in a more printer-friendly format here as Harry Potter and the Law.
I also met Lisa Bunker of Accio Quote and Madam Pince’s Potter Pages, and she gave me a T-shirt! Thanks, Lisa!
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Seen any Jodel? Was she harping on about her hate for book seven?
JG drew a parallel between Harry’s struggle to trust DD and JKR’s struggle to believe in God, eh?
I can see the parallels: believing in the absence of evidence, and sometimes in the face of the evidence, but believing because of faith and love. Still a little blasphamous, wouldn’t you say?
Reyhan, I don’t think it’s blasphemous. When I read Rowling’s interview in which she talked about her struggle to keep believing and how it was apparent in DH, I was thinking of Dumbledore, too. He was a man Harry really believed in and whom he trusted almost infinitely (except for his judgment on Snape).
Yet, he began to doubt until he came to a point where he didn’t know what to believe or whom to believe any more. He was getting different stories from different people. Did Dumbledore ever care for him, did he ever love him? His was a very serious issue and a serious struggle for Harry. He felt betrayed, abandoned, lied to.
Of course, it isn’t the same as religious faith or having faith in God, but there certainly are similarities and parallels. If Rowling had compared Dumbledore with God, giving him divine status, then it would be blasphemous, he was just a human being after all. But it was difficult for Harry to realize that Dumbledore’s humanity meant that he’s made mistakes, some of them rather severe.
Reyhan, yeah, actually the main point was that Dumbledore represented spiritual authority/the church, which fits a lot better, since that is flawed. My explanation was very brief and did not do it justice…his talk was quite well done.
Thanks for passing along those links! And congrats on your successes.