We sometimes hear the word “pride” tossed around so much that it just becomes another slogan. People are encouraged to be proud of everything from their sports teams to their genetic make-up. However, this week, after a wonderful sermon on why pride is a problem (thanks, Pastor Alan), I re-read the first sentence of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, a line that is surprisingly 
revealing, and I began to ponder pride a little more in terms of its role as a spiritually corrosive force in fantasy literature, just as it is in life. So, let’s visit that deadly sin that rears its ugly head around so many real and fictional corners.
Pride, not to be confused with self-respect or satisfaction with a job well done, is a sin that is ridiculously common among human beings. No less a personage than Benjamin Franklin pointed out that if we think we have really overcome pride, then we will become proud of our humility. We are, by our very nature, easily drawn into pride. Perhaps that is why it is such an effective element to characterize fictional people. By creating characters who suffer from the sin of pride, authors can make these characters more believable while, at the same time, using that pride to make readers dislike them. For, strangely enough, although everyone has succumbed to pride, it tends to be an easy sin for us to condemn, even while we are guilty of it ourselves.
o say some of the remarkable words we run across at Hogwarts and elsewhere. Sometimes, after reading and re-reading a book for years, we are stunned to hear an audiobook or movie adaptation that completely contrasts with the way we have been saying the word in our heads (or in nightly read-alouds). With film adaptations, there are even some pretty divisive opinions about whether the movie people are, as Hermione would tell us, saying it wrong. It would be easy to say that it’s just potato/potAHto, and Sca-mander/Scam-ander, but, the fact is, words have power, literally and figuratively, especially in the books we discuss here, so let’s think about a few reasons that it does matter how we say words, whether we are making a movie, having a conversation, or just reading aloud at bedtime…. 
trying to wrap up the ends of our terms. It is a good time, then, for us to reflect on the pedagogical strategies and teaching lessons we can all take from Harry’s professors. Even though they teach subjects that are largely fabricated, the faculty members of the fictional Hogwarts do provide some pearls of wisdom for those of us in the non-fictional teaching profession.
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