Harry Potter found Orthodox, with thoughts on Rowling vs. Cooper

This is for those of you who've experienced a conversation that begins something like this:

You like Harry Potter books? But they're all about magic, and as a Christian I don't think we should indulge ourselves in reading something that is tainted with the occult. Besides, Harry lies and keeps secrets from adults - what kind of example is that for children?

At some point you then run into:

Well, C.S. Lewis is different. After all, Aslan is clearly Jesus. There's no God in Rowling's work.

And then:

Well, J.R.R Tolkein, he's different too. Besides LOTR is the book of the century - there maybe no God in LOTR, but Frodo is pretty Christ-like, isn't he?

And usually ends with:

Well, I just don't see the point of reading something like that. I'd be better off spending my time reading something more edifying.

The good news is you can now refer skeptics to a great article by Mark Shea, Harry Potter and the Christian Critics, posted on the First Things blog. WARNING: SPOILERS, esp. of the final book. For those of you disturbed by a certain part of the climax of the series, Shea comes up with a really helpful reading of the episode that might alleviate some concern.

I've recently been re-reading the first two books of Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series, soon to come out in the movies. Cooper is a very talented writer, in some ways more so than Rowling, but a comparison of the two reveals how much more deeply Christian is Rowling's work.

Cooper is a modern dualist, and says as much in her books (esp. in The Dark is Rising, where the world that she has created is explained to Will, the protagonist). The Light for Cooper is defined not by goodness and love, per se, but by its enmity to the Dark, an enmity that is part of the nature of the Light and not a choice. Dark and Light are equally matched opposites, and victory is not at all guaranteed to the Light. The Light are much more considerate of humans than the Dark, and indeed fight on their behalf, but are also willing to pragmatically sacrifice people to accomplish their purpose, something that the virtuous human characters do not do. Bound by their nature and equal to their adversaries, their mercy and love are limited to the tools at their disposal. The results are sometimes quite startlingly pitiless, as truth and mercy are run rough-shod over in order to defeat the Dark and to save humans from pain. There are no gods here; only the magical nature of things and certain persons, which are in turn bound by rules over which they have no control within a world where the bounds between nature and persons are blurred. Victory is through magical strength (whether of persons or things), cunning, and a splash of luck or destiny writ in the nature of things. The ultimate vision is rather bleak, although Cooper tries to stay upbeat. On top of all this, the Church is explicitly denigrated as powerless to fight evil and is implied to be founded on a benign falsehood. A well-meaning vicar tries to fight the Dark through Christian prayer and exorcism, only to be side-lined as ineffectual and treated rather like a brave but foolhardy child while the Light wage the real war and win through magic objects. Will's dualist theology provokes concern by the vicar, who quite understandably wants to have a talk with him someday, but Will's attitude towards him is that of a world-weary grownup who knows better.

There is none of this sort of thing in HP. Christ may not feature in Harry's world, but neither is He side-lined as He is explicitly in Will's world. Also, Rowling has a strikingly different understanding of the battle between good and evil than Cooper. Rowling consistently demonstrates the ultimate weakness of evil, for all of its hideous strength. It fails not because its wizards are not cunning--indeed, who is more cunning than Voldemort?--but because a wicked man is incapable of valuing what is truly valuable: his soul (among other things). As in LOTR and Narnia, evil is not countered by strength in HP, but by self-sacrificial weakness, love, and loyalty. No one is merely expendable, not even enemies (who are generally treated without mercy by Cooper). In HP, goodness or wickedness is not something that you're born to, but born out of the choices you make, and no one in the entire cast (except possibly Lily) makes perfect choices. All sin and fall short. Unlike Cooper's series, in Rowling's series mercy and repentence are not limited, but offered to all, even while the cost of rejecting mercy remains.

Anyways, go look at Shea's article - it's a good read, far better than these scattered musings.

The Quest for the Perfect Bookholder

For many years now, I have been a staunch supporter of the portable book holder. The benefits are clear: easing neck pain and preventing scholar hunch, holding cookbooks away from the splatter zone, enabling the habit of reading while eating (or, conversely, breastfeeding, for you moms out there),...the list goes on and on.

The champion of years past I picked up on a whim one day at a local Borders. I haven't seen another like it for some time,* until today when I finally found its blessed maker Mighty Bright®. Now you too can savour the wonder of hands-free reading. The beauty of this model is of course its simplicity, its almost child-like simplicity. It folds up to be as flat as its non-pokey wires are thin. It never rips pages. It slides inside folders that you are taking into the library. It weighs almost nothing. It costs $6. It can manage most hardbacks and a lot of paperbacks. So many book holders make the mistake of being complicated, clunky, cutesy, and constrained by totally arbitrary expectations of book size. What is the point of a book holder that is only suitable for the lecturn? I'm a modern woman - I need mobility, choice, idiot-proofing, freedom from postures of authority, ridiculously cheap goods made in Asia, and...erm...thin-ness. Yeah! THIN-NESS!

So I rather like MightyBright®'s offering here, but...I've seen something new, exciting, different, and relentlessly marketed as the ultimate book holder with a media onslaught, the Easy-Read, which also doubles as a clip-on document holder - oh, the versatility! It is a little more complicated, but looks as if it might be able to take on almost any normal book, hardback or paperback, sizes b-d in UL lingo. The price is quite a bit steeper (all that research into ergonomics, I bet). There is a picture of it perched on a couch arm and nestled securely on the sands of the beach. It even has its own animated 'adventure'. Now that's classy, ain't it?

Anyhoo, I thought I'd pass on info about both to avid readers out there. Let me know how the Easy-Read goes. (I don't think I can wheedle one out of Pancho anytime soon...)


* I originally wrote "never saw another like it", but I was just informed that I bought another for a friend about 4 years ago, so there goes that hyperbole. The memory is already going - too much RAM devoted to dissertation, apparently...must de-fragment my drive...preferably in Majorca...on the beach...with Pancho...

A wedding in Dumfries, Scotland, and some walks in the Lakes

What we've been up to this summer, or some reasons (besides PhD) I haven't blogged much lately

Hiking in Wales and a day at a Cardiff beach with John, Yu-Chiao, and Beatrice




Church picnic, Balsham Manor, home of Sir Fred and Lady Elizabeth Catherwood



And click through to some Cambridge decadence back in June...

Ladybug's new calendar

A few days ago, I came home from another day slogging away ineffectually at an article to find roses, a card, and a small package awaiting me -- a surprise from Pancho! My confidence had been flagging to levels of near collapse, but Pancho zoomed to the rescue with encouragement and presents.

In the package was a Moleskine notebook, a posh planner that I've been eyeing for some time now but couldn't reconcile myself to the price (£10 for something I normally pay £3 for) or to the risk of the self-conscious pretension involved in buying myself a 'serious' 'professional' calendar. It bears noting that Moleskine vaunts itself as "the legendary notebook of Van Gogh, Chatwin, Hemingway, Matisse and Céline" and the website even carries images of itself carrying the work of such luminaries.* I was amazed at how all those qualms disappeared when Pancho gave me one - if it's a present, it can't be pretentious to have it, right? Now I am only in danger of pretension in the use of it, I suppose.

So I'm a few days into my new Moleskine-directed life, and while I am still entranced by it, I have to admit I feel somehow obligated to live up to it. Though it is essentially a week-at-a-glance calendar, it pairs the week with a blank ruled page, presumably for all the elegant thoughts I would be having if I were Satre, Gertrude Stein, or George Bataille. That the blank lines can stand as a rebuke to me reminds me that pride takes the most mundane opportunities to make you an ass. I'm not really that keen on the thought-life of Satre et al., but neither am I always content with the thought-life of Ladybug, and PhD-ing in particular often makes me feel inadequate and foolish. Still, I think my moleskine is a good thing, an opportunity to take every moleskine captive for Christ, and I've decided to use the extra space to record brief, gloriously inelegant jottings about what I read in the Word day-by-day and go back to the long-lost habit of sermon notes on the blank lines every week, thus substituting a temptation to want to be greater than I am with days read in light of God's transforming work in my life.

Grand plans, and hopefully not wholly prompted by a spiritualized desire to be 'serious'. I take it as a good sign that I almost missed a rehearsal yesterday because I failed to check my new calendar.


* Can we perhaps cite JKR as a possible user, given the importance of Hagrid's 'moleskin' in keeping things safe for Harry in Deathly Hallows?