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Yale

When I started sending out book proposals over a year ago for God and Harry at Yale, part of me never believed that I was up to the task of writing a book. Books are long. They have chapters and indexes and titles. They take an awful lot of time and you have to fill up an awful lot of pages, and as I stared at the blank computer screen in front of me, I just didn’t think it would happen.
Until I was about three-quarters of the way through the draft, a part of me was sur that God and Harry at Yale would never be a reality. I had so much evidence to back my claim up: I’d never written a book before; I only had ten weeks to complete a draft; I didn’t really know what I was doing because I’d never written a book before (ooh, did I say that already?). Yet sentence by sentence and page by page, I created one, because despite everything that made me think writing a book was too lofty a goal, I trusted a gut instinct, a belief that I could complete it.

Though this is a story about writing and not about God, it’s still a story about faith. People who possess faith in God, or for that matter anything else, may or may not have compelling evidence to support that belief (see last week’s post), but they believe nonetheless. For some people, that faith feels solid or feels like a given while for others, it becomes a journey full of questioning and doubt. [click to continue…]

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Hog's Head ConversationsGreetings Harry Potter enthusiasts! Whether you used the Knight Bus, floo powder, or, um, your keyboard, I’m so glad that you found your way to my guest blogging at the Hog’s Head. I’m going to be hanging with you all for a few weeks, and I’m looking forward to chatting about one of my favorite topics: the relationship between Christianity and the Harry Potter books. But before we get to that, I thought I’d start by telling you a little bit about myself.

For the past two years, I’ve been teaching a seminar at Yale University on Christian theology and Harry Potter. It’s a full semester course that provides an introduction to key topics in Christianity and asks students to analyze how those ideas are present (or not) in the series. The class has been a huge hit on campus—over 70 students have signed up each term, even though the class is capped at 18, and going through their applications is both a challenge and great fun. I’m pretty sure no other instructor on campus gets to hear about how their potential students founded Quidditch Clubs in their high schools or read Prisoner of Azkaban over and over on rainy days in elementary school. I feel like the luckiest teacher in the world because of that: I know my students are passionate about the class, and that makes me passionate too. [click to continue…]

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