Here is some material from a Christian site that engages the brain as well as the spirit.
J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels were never primarily about magic. They were always primarily about sacrificial love. And in the final film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, as in the more nuanced novel, Rowling's exploration of love takes us into fresh and fertile terrain.
The Potter story begins with Harry's mother's self-sacrifice for her infant child. It is this love that protects him from the Dark Lord's murderous intent. Harry is covered by his mother's blood - her life for his. Similarly, in the first novel, Ron risks death that others might live but survives, whilst Flammel, the owner of the Philosopher's Stone, consents to its destruction, and thereby foregoes his own immortality.
As the series progresses, Harry comes to realise that what distinguishes him from his enemy is his capacity to love. In the denouement, that capacity is tested to the limit, as he, like Aslan, like Jesus, deliberately puts himself in the power of his enemy.
Rowling's exploration of love and its costs, however, goes wider. Yes, the children are central but, unlike most children's fiction, the adults in the Potter stories are critical both to the action and the themes. So Harry's allies - surrogate families and godparents and teachers - are not just committed to a cause but committed to Harry. In particular, Dumbledore, Harry's headmaster and surrogate father, nurtures him, protects him, empowers him, loves him. Still, we discover, he had always known that, if Voldemort were to be defeated, Harry would have to die. What kind of love, the film asks, can nurture a child with that dread knowledge? What kind of love enables a loving 'father' to raise a son for a death so premature?
And what kind of love does Snape display? Not only working, at enormous personal risk, to defeat Voldemort but committed to the protection of Harry, the child of a man he despised and of a woman, now dead, whom he had loved from childhood but who had not loved him. Here is the nobility of an unrequited love that does not curdle to bitterness or revenge but does what the beloved would want, even though that love cannot be returned. Selfless faithfulness indeed.
True love, Rowling teaches us, comes in many forms. And she has thereby given us, it seems to me, one of the richest explorations of love ever offered in children's fiction.
Bravo, I say.
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. [bless and do not curse] 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
LICC
