Harry Potter, St. Augustine, and the Confrontation with Evil

Jean Bethke Elshtain died last month at age 72. I suspect many readers here do not know who she was. I certainly didn’t until a septuagenarian friend in Bellingham, Washington, who had read Hidden Key to Harry Potter in 2002 and liked it, told me about the lecture she had given months before at the Smithsonian, ‘Harry Potter, St Augustine, and the Confrontation with Evil’ (above, given at a later date). My friend assured me this was big news that Bethke Elshtain had ‘come out’ on the for side in the Potter Wars that were raging then, because she was considered by thoughtful Evangelicals to be a political scientist and theological giant striding the earth.

Eager as I was for any kind of support for my book but especially for a recommendation that would have this kind of weight, I sent her a copy of my book and asked her, if she would be so kind as to read it, and, if she liked it, would she, could she write a short blurb?

Presumptuous hope? Oh, yeah. I did the same thing with Prof Alan Jacobs then at Wheaton College; he returned the book unopened and derided my literary alchemy and Eliade thoughts in an article in First Things. Which was probably the kind of response I should have expected for a ‘cold call’ request to “drop everything, read my book, and please endorse it.”

Prof Bethke Elshtain, however, read the book and very soon after wrote a very flattering and generous endorsement. Tyndale featured it in Looking for God in Harry Potter (2004). I have often thought this paragraph from a respected Christian thinker may have been the reason they decided to publish the book; it gave them significant cover in the world of Christian Book Sellers, all of whom carried her works because they and their customers admired her.

Forgive me, then, in my self-importance, for thinking that victory in the Potter Panic was won to some degree when this woman, diminutive only in appearance, took to the battlements. I know her kindness to me in this first request and in later correspondence about how she came to read the stories (grandchildren, as you might have guessed) and other subjects, were a great support to me when I wondered if my critics weren’t right in the consensus that I was a nutter for arguing that there was significant Christian content in the Hogwarts Saga and this was the reason for their success.

You can and probably should read the Wikipedia life summary and the obituaries at The Atlantic, the University of Chicago (where she was a professor, albeit long after my time there as an undergraduate), in The Christian Post, and the Chronicles of Higher Education. You’ll come away from those eulogies with some appreciation, I hope, of what an insignificant part of her grand life discussing Harry Potter was, — but in that small part, she made a critical contribution that changed the balance in what was then considered a lost cause.

Memory Eternal.

Hercule Poirot is to test his famous grey cells once again in a “new” Agatha Christie novel – the first featuring the Belgian detective since Christie’s death in 1976.

 

Christie is the latest author to be resurrected by her estate, following novels in the style of Ian Fleming and PG Wodehouse written by contemporary authors. Bestselling crime writer Sophie Hannah is to write the as-yet untitled novel in Christie’s style, which will be published next year.

She said: “Writing a book with Poirot in it will be like writing about someone I know really well. I’ve read all the books so many times – I wouldn’t want to do this for any other writer. It was Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple who, between them, made me want to devote my working life to crime fiction.” The work, published by HarperCollins, will be the first fully-authorised Poirot novel since the author’s death.

“The argument that might convince her is that it’s an attempt to reintroduce an already enthusiastic public to the books she wrote. That would have made her sympathetic to what we’re trying to do. When we heard that someone of Sophie’s eminence wanted to be involved in a project like this, we felt the opportunity was too good to miss.”

Friend of this blog Bruce Charlton has written a challenging post at his Miscellany weBlog, ‘Harry Potter and the need for a single volume Half Blood Prince/ Deathly Hallows.’ In it he argues that Ms Rowling is very much correct when she noted in an interview that the last two books “slide into one another” and work as a whole. Mr Charlton writes:

I am again re-reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – and as I began to break down in tears in a cafe (halfway through ‘The Missing Mirror’ chapter), and was forced to lay the book aside and stop reading or risk dissolving into a blubbering mass; I realized for the nth time that many adults are missing reading this wonderful book for the simple reason that they are either unable or unwilling to read children’s books.

The problem is that, according to conventional wisdom, the Deathly Hallows can only be approached via the preceding six Harry Potter stories; two of which are designed for intelligent (approx) eight year olds, the next for ten year olds, two more for 12-14 year olds, and only the last two volumes of being fully adult novels.

His solution?

In fact, in terms of both structure and style, the Half Blood Prince and Deathly Hallows make up a unit: therefore, the solution is that they should be published together in a single mega-volume marketed to adults – and with all the necessary back story provided in the form or a Foreword or Preface, plus a few explanatory notes (probably as footnotes).