A reader named RB has offered a comment and question concerning our favorite magician, Harry Potter: I really appreciate your blogs on Harry Potter and your goal to challenge typical evangelical thinking. It needs done. I’m wondering what your opinions are on sorcery being used within a story (as in LOTR, Narnia, and Harry Potter). […]
Harry Potter
Is Peter Pan satanic too?
Olabode Ososami has continued his tirade against Harry Potter. Sadly, he has also taken to deleting the comments of those who are critical of his views, a move which tends to make dialogue rather challenging. In his first article he ominously warned against watching the HP films: spiritually, it will cost a Christian everything … […]
“Is J.K. Rowling a witch?” and other vile fundamentalist Christian gossip
I am not as interested in defending Harry Potter as three blog posts might lead you to believe. But I am interested in critiquing the rampant fundamentalist anti-intellectualism that Mark Noll critiqued so adeptly in The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind. And I am really interested in exposing the pharisaical underbelly of fundamentalist Christianity which spreads vile […]
The Pornographic Harry Potter? On the near impossibility of reasoning with Christian fundamentalists
When I was in Rio last month I found myself in the back of a cab on my way to the conference at which I was to speak. Unfortunately, when we arrived I discovered that the cabbie didn’t accept credit cards and I had no Brazilian money. To complicate matters further, the poor fellow spoke no […]
An Open Letter to Harry Potter
Dear Mr. Potter, I wanted to thank you for your astounding achievement. No, not the beating Lord Voldemort bit. Kudos for that to be sure. But I wanted to thank you for a greater achievement: getting kids engaged in literature. We live in a culture where literacy is going down the tubes. A century ago kids wrote […]
Hopeful Universalism and the Lottery Illustration
In “Does universalism have a chance in hell of being true?” I argued that there is indeed a case to be made for universalism just like there is a case to be made for Calvinism and Arminianism. It may not be as strong a case, but there is a case to be made. This means […]
