The Worst Kind of Fascism...

...is the kind that claims it's "for your own good."

Have you heard about the new law (which went into effect February 10) that criminalizes the selling or distribution of all childrens' books printed before 1985, unless each one is tested for lead. You know, to protect "the children" from lead-containing ink, which no doubt kills millions every year--wait, what?

If you're a lover of literature, read this, it'll break your heart. Apparently the American Library Association is already engaging in civil disobedience, claiming it will assume the law does not apply to them unless they hear otherwise, but many private booksellers have already destroyed their stocks in fear of the $100,000 fines mandated by the law.

Then again, Congress is looking for a way to cover that budget deficit...

*HT for the image: The Leaky Cauldron

New Harry Potter Trailer

I can't believe they're making us wait until July 2009, but it looks good:



And if you missed it, check out the international teaser trailer here.

The Christian Carnival and Then Some

This week's Christian Carnival is at A True Believers Blog, and includes my post on The Dark Knight and plenty of other things. In particular, this post which quotes an humorous Rabbinic discussion about animals too big for Noah's ark, and also links to a series of posts (here, here, here and here) on why the flood cannot have been global, and why it shouldn't matter.

In other news, Mark Shea links to an excellent post at Old World Swine on Harry Potter, magic tents, free will and materialism—you'll have to read it.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

I finally saw the fifth Harry Potter film yesterday. It wasn’t my favorite of the series (then again, neither was the book); but I still enjoyed it, especially the final battle at the Ministry of Magic. They actually did a pretty good job of cramming the excessively lengthy book into less than two and a half hours, though there were some odd points of bad acting and it felt a bit choppy at times. Even so, there was one scene that I particularly appreciated and wanted to highlight. I don’t remember it being in the book (though I don’t have it in front of me to check), but if not, it was a great addition.

About halfway through the film, Harry is with his godfather Sirius Black and confesses his fear about the close ties between himself and the evil Lord Voldemort. Sirius’ response is a concise but excellent statement of the view of human nature which underlies so much of J.K. Rowling’s series: that it isn’t our background, family or even our abilities which define us, but our choices. The line between good and evil cuts through each and every one of us, and we each must choose which side to embrace. It’s a nice scene between the two of them, and the message is just about perfect:

Harry: This connection between me and Voldemort, what if the reason for it is that I am becoming more like him? I just feel so angry, all the time, and what if after everything that I’ve been through, something’s gone wrong inside me? What if I’m becoming bad?

Sirius: I want you to listen to me very carefully, Harry. You’re not a bad person. You’re a very good person who bad things have happened to. You understand?

Harry nods.

Sirius: The world isn’t split into good people and death eaters, we’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we chose to act on, that’s who we really are.

I especially like the second half of Sirius' response, and the rest of the film plays on this tension well, both by showing the dire consequences of Harry's poor choices, and then by highlighting his final confrontation with the evil inside of him, at the climax of the movie. Order of the Phoenix isn't a perfect film, but it gets this part quite right.

More Harry Potter and Christian Morality

Over at Mere Comments, S.M. Hutchens has an interesting post on Harry Potter's Christian trajectory:

The Rowling fantasy, for those who are able to see it, is a very typical moral tale of the Judeo-Christian west: it is the story (I have said elsewhere that this is the only real Story there is) of the hidden prince born in troubled obscurity, who finds it in himself to love good and oppose evil, and who, aided by a rather motley lot of companions, destroys at the forfeit of his life the kingdom of the Evil One, finally coming into his own and living happily ever after. It is the story of the Gospel; it is our story. To love it is to love the story of Christ and his church. Harry Potter is an imperfect Christ, to be sure, but what reasonable person would confuse the thing itself with its image?

Read the whole thing.

Glamorized Magic and Harry Potter

I finally convinced my wife to watch one of the Harry Potter films this week. She enjoyed it more than she expected, but remained concerned that these are marketed to children. Echoing a common Christian objection to the series, she asked: What if, by glamorizing magic, it leads kids to the occult? As adults, she admitted, we can see that this is fantasy, but kids are impressionable. I pointed out that the magic in Harry Potter bears no relation to any kind of real-world sorcery (no gods or demons are invoked or manipulated; they merely wave wands around and speak in Latin!). Then it occurred to me: If a movie’s effect on kids is truly one’s concern, Harry Potter ought to be much further down the list than it usually is.

If kids really are liable to copy what they see in their favorite films, shouldn’t we be much less concerned about magic, and much more concerned about glamorized violence? After all, a kid can practice waving a stick around all week and he’s not going to do any harm, but how many times does he need to see his heroes solve their problems by beating up or killing “bad guys,” before he considers trying that? If, on the other hand, a story can legitimately employ violence as a metaphor for the battle between good and evil, why cannot fictionalized magic be used in the same way?

Surely I’m not the first to have thought of this.

Mark Shea on Harry Potter

If my previous post was maddeningly vague on why I think Harry Potter is a deeply Christian tale, let me correct that by heartily recommending Mark Shea's piece over at First Things: "Harry Potter and the Christian Critics" (need I say Spoiler Warning?). He succinctly demolishes each of the major "Christian" objections to the series, and is well worth a read.

Harry Potter and the Christian Story

To many of us post-moderns, the Christian story seems rather a mundane thing. Residing in the back of our collective consciousness, it’s just familiar enough to seem unremarkable, yet just unknown enough to be misunderstood. Even Sunday school can be like a vaccine, providing just enough theology to leave us immune to the deep drama of the faith.

It was into just such a situation that C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien wrote their works of fantasy. Their goal was to create fiction that could cut through that cultural immunity, and allow a modern audience to hear the Christian story as though for the first time. As Lewis put it:

I thought I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood. Why did one find it so hard to feel as one was told one ought to feel about God or about the sufferings of Christ? I thought the chief reason was that one was told one ought to. An obligation to feel can freeze feelings. And reverence itself did harm. The whole subject was associated with lowered voices; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that by casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-glass and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency? Could one not thus steal past those watchful dragons?

It was an admirable goal, but only partially accomplished. Both Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia and Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings would eventually become exceedingly popular, but only long after their intentions were respectively too well-known and entirley missed. Thus, for many readers, the Christian themes of Narnia were a bit too obvious, a bit too early, to evade "those watchful dragons," while the imaginative mythology of Lord of the Rings quickly obscured its own Christian trajectory. Don't get me wrong, both series are outstanding in their own ways, but it remains unclear just how well they fulfilled their intentions.

It was with this background in mind that I finally read J.K. Rowling’s epic Harry Potter series this past month (now you know why my blogging has been so much lighter!). Though I had seen (and enjoyed) a couple of the movies, reading the series all at once proved far more satisfying than I ever expected. Having studiously avoided reading anyone else's views on the series, I was most surprized by just how well Rowling (a practicing member of the Church of Scotland) had managed to accomplish precisely the goal that Lewis and Tolkien set themselves. On the one hand, she managed to build an absolutely unprecedented readership who adored the series without yet knowing where it was headed (according to some reports, the series had sold over 300 million copies before the final book was released!). On the other hand, by the end of the Deathly Hallows she had succeeded in retelling the Christian story in a way that is at once freshly engaging, deeply nostalgic, and hardly mistakable.

Though lacking the poetic beauty of Lord of the Rings, and obscuring some of Narnia's theological distinctions, Harry Potter pulls together countless imaginative story-lines involving dozens of well-developed characters, while seamlessly interweaving a host of important themes: from coming of age and facing death, to love and friendship, trust and loyalty, and redemption and sacrifice, to courage and betrayal, good and evil, and much else. That entire books were written decrying the series' “anti-Christian” message (I haven’t read them, but I can't imagine anyone writing one now), indicates just how well she has accomplished her goal.

So as not to spoil them for anyone who hasn’t yet read the books (you really should!), I wont go into any details, but suffice it to say that Rowling has admirably lived up to her forebears in Lewis and Tolkien, not least because she allowed her Christian themes to build to a fitting climax, rather than airing them out too early. In the end, Harry Potter proves much more explicitly Christian than The Lord of the Rings, yet much less obtrusive than The Chronicles of Narnia. I really cannot recommend it highly enough; I only wish I had another month to reread it, now that I know how it all comes together!

If anyone else here has read the series, what are your reactions?

UPDATE: If you've come to this post directly and want a more detailed account of Harry Potter's Christian nature, don't miss Mark Shea's "Harry Potter and the Christian Critics" (Spoiler Warning).