In late October I wrote a piece for Townhall.com on Harry Potter and Christians. I briefly discussed John Granger's response to Christians who say the Bible forbids books like Harry Potter:

John Granger, an Orthodox Christian, homeschooling father, college professor, author of Looking for God in Harry Potter, and former Potter skeptic, has put a great deal of work into researching Christian themes and symbolism in the books. For example, he draws a distinction between invocational magic, or sorcery, clearly condemned in the Bible, and incantational magic, as practiced in the books. His site, HogwartsProfessor.com, is a treasure trove of Harry Potter-related information written from a Christian perspective.

“Objections to the magic in Harry Potter…mistake the edifying use of magic in literature for actual invocational sorcery condemned by Scripture which it clearly is not,” he said. Granger even claims that Harry Potter is “Christian fiction.” According to Granger, J.K. Rowling is an Inkling, a group of British writers that included C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, who wrote Christian fiction. He argues that this “marks her as a writer in the English traditions of writing faith edifying literature, what is often called ‘baptizing the imagination’ or ‘smuggling the gospel.’”

Invocational and incantational distinctions aside, one can make a compelling case that all forms of magic are forbidden, but are Christians forbidden to read about it? I can't call myself a witch and be a Christian, but as I Christian, I can read fictional stories about witches.

Continue reading 'Magic' in Harry Potter and Narnia

"[He] sent the human race what I call good dreams: I mean those queer stories scattered all through the heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again and, by his death, has somehow given new life to men. He also selected one particular people and spent several centuries hammering into their heads the sort of God He was — that there was only one of Him and that He cared about right conduct. Those people were the Jews, and the Old Testament gives an account of the hammering process.

Then comes the real shock. Among these Jews there suddenly turns up a man who goes about talking as if He was God. He claims to forgive sins. He says He has always existed. He says He is coming to judge the world at the end of time. Now let us get this clear. Among Pantheists, like the Indians, anyone might say that he was a part of God, or one with God: there would be nothing very odd about it. But this man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside the world Who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else. And when you have grasped that, you will see that what this man said was, quite simply, the most shocking thing that has ever been uttered by human lips.

Continue reading Liar, Lord, or Lunatic