Harry Potter: Shared Text for Our Time

Hurrah for sanity!  Excerpts:

....Harry Potter isn’t the gateway to the occult but a portal to a lifetime of edifying reading. The Harry Potter generation will be a generation that reads for pleasure. This in itself represents a significant cultural shift in the offing.

...Before meeting Allan Bloom and, through him, the Western canon, my friends and I were a sarcastic and self-absorbed, if good-hearted lot, nourished on stories that were only diversion and dissipation. I have to think my children are better prepared and more willing to embrace that tradition than I was because of their years of instruction at Hogwarts castle.

I struggle to think of any fictional work of the last two or three centuries that had the potential to shape the cultural and political agendas of its time as this one does. Dickens’s crusading social novels? Uncle Tom’s Cabin? The Jungle? Harry Potter differs from these in that the others ignited a latent Christian conscience. The Potter novels help foster one into existence.

Chuck Klosterman regrets the dawn of a Harry Potter generation but acknowledges it. I join him in pointing to the elephant at the door but rush to usher the pachyderm in. Harry is not the Bible, Pilgrim’s Progress, or Plutarch’s Lives; it is, however, a shared text and a profound one operating on many levels.

From this text, we can build a conversation about virtue and vice, and about what reading does to the right-side-up soul. From it, too, we can take an invitation to go on to even better books—ones that our grandparents’ great-grandparents had in common, and others that our children may one day write. Hasten the day!...

For more, see here.