Half-Blood Prince

I'm about halfway through reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. I guess Rowling is a pretty good author of mysteries because I still don't really know who the Prince might be (though have a couple of ideas).

When the first Potter came out, the conservative church folks went crazy. This was going to glorify witchcraft and lead all our children into Satanism. I wasn't too impressed with their hysteria because I'd heard it all before—advantage of being an older guy. Before Harry Potter, we worried about Lord of the Rings and even Narnia.

I guess we can forgive the hysterical people for condemning Potter without reading him. After all, Christians are definitely on the losing side in every way, and there's no real probability that God will win the final conflict, right? Jesus is, according to these folks, a nice but weak guy who got hauled into a political conflict he's not really ready for. That's why his followers have to be so strident and political, and why even the whiff of non-Christian religion is so terrifying.

They forget a couple of things. For one, good British folk have, for generations, been fascinated with the occult, paranormal, and non-Christian religion. We all listen to Holst's Planets and think it's about the balls of dirt cycling around the sun. It's about astrology. For another, the only real biblical example of terrified Christians is in the odd little period between the crucifixion and Pentecost.

Anyhow, Potter is interesting. There's never any discussion in the books about the source of all this magic power. It seems to be genetic, like the ability to curl one's tongue into a tube. Christmas is mentioned, along with a couple of other Christian references, but there's an unusual lack of anything religious. If anyone ever worships anything, it's the Death Eaters worshipping the Dark Lord—and that's a very evil thing according to the book. Lots of battle between good and evil. No discussion of the eventual source of it all.

But Potter himself is sort of an Everyman. He's suffered greatly. Not too comfortable in most social situations. And has enormous power that he doesn't know how to tap into.