With all my theological wafflings I have completely negelected to mention the single greatest thing Ms. Rowling and Master (now Mr) Potter have contributed to my life:

My daughter reads English books now.

With Natascha, it wasn't that she wasn't a reader and the Potter books converted her. She's a huge reader. She inherited my wife's and my reading ( Read more... )

There was a pre-DH Time article in which claimed that The Potterverse is a universe without God.  Obviously there’s something to that - certainly, no one ever talks about God - or any other personal being comparable to him.

Unless you mean the whole Love thing, which the article’s author dismisses as psychobabble. I’ll get to that later.

For now, ( Read more... )

(With thanks to A.A. Milne)

I've always been fascinated by Rowling's interviews. As long as the series was still being written they were fun for a bit of innocent sluething; and now that the series is over it's nice to savor a long goodbye at the top of a fictional forest halfway between Hogwarts and a television studio in New York.
Which leads to ( Read more... )

I've been sending this to anyone who might potentially be interested, so I might as well put it here, too:

Since Deathly Hallows appeared there's been a significant amount of discusssion about religious aspects of Harry Potter - but Harry is hardly the only fantasy work worth discussion from a religious angle. For example, I'm working on a project ( Read more... )

Not long after HBP was published, Rowling answered a question about the religious weight of her books with a typical one-liner, "But Dumbledore is not Jesus." (You can say a lot about Rowling's flaby prose, but she has one of the best left jabs in the business.) Fair enough. No resurrections there.

But how about Harry? Harry drinks the cup of death ( Read more... )

Here's an issue that probably won't be coming up immediately in our debates about the epilogue, the wand-thing and the final doom of H/Hers:

There's some stuff about this series, as it has now been completed, that's rather atypical of fantasy - or rather, there's some non-stuff. In particular, we are never given a narrative to explain the ( Read more... )

Sue's father died last week ( Read more... )

Well, well. She really is done, and in July we'll get to find out what she has done ( Read more... )

Odd ( Read more... )

Resolution #1: Write something in LJ rather than merely defacing other people's ( Read more... )