spoilers at Gypsy Scholar

Not shy about sharing actual spoilers, Dr. Hodges has blogged a great post that discusses religious tropes in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, which everyone knows is JK Rowling's seventh and final book in the Harry Potter series. This post contains passages from rather significant moments in the book, so read with caution if you're still working your way through the novel.

The good professor has also blogged a followup post that begins with an amusing "tract" (a word used* by certain fundamentalist Christians when referring to a cheap, B&W comic strip that spells out the fundamentalist position in cute vignettes) about the evils of reading the Harry Potter series.

The aim of both of Dr. Hodges's posts is to explore just how Christian the Potter series is. Having finished the seventh book, I'd have to say that it is nearly impossible not to draw connections between Rowling's storyline and major themes in Christianity... but in saying that, I may already have said too much.

My own discussion of the Potter series will occur sometime later this month.

---

*Misused, in my opinion. I normally think of the term "tract" as having a dignified connotation (it comes from the Latin tractatus, after all-- a word used by the likes of Ludwig Wittgenstein in the titles of major works such as the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus), but a glance at the online Webster's shows that the word is indeed applicable to less honorable things like religious propaganda.

I used to read those little comics when I was a kid. Avidly. Who knows how warped I became because of them? As an adult I view such "tracts" as among the most odious forms of manipulation in existence. They do their job well: as a kid, I used to think about the ideas presented in those comics, peppering my father with questions about the afterlife, God, and so on.


_