The most frequently requested article from the old Hogwarts Professor site after “Obviously Dumbledore is not Jesus” has been this piece on the scandalous use of the Pope by Canadian Harry Haters and Culture Warriors the day before Half-Blood Prince was released. I re-print it now in anticipation of similar shameful efforts in the third week of July this year. Harry Potter is a phenomenon those who style themselves latter-day Savonarolas almost certainly will not let pass without a volley and flourish.

“Pope Opposes Harry Potter”? Hardly.
Michael O’Brien and the Kuby Letters: Rita Skeeter covers the Vatican

A Time Line and Commentary on the Kuby Letters, supposedly written by Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict XVI), on the subject of the Harry Potter novels written by Joanne Rowling.

February, 2003:

The story begins at the press conference releasing the Pontifical Council on Culture and Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue’s of “Vatican statement on New Age Religions’ Jesus Christ: The Bearer of the Water of Life (A Christian Reflection on the “New Age”). [Read more…]

If you do, just click here. The link will take you to the Zossima Press web site shopping cart. I’ll autograph anything you order there that I’ve written. You betcha.

Shamelessly mercenary John

Sorry about the absence from the weBlog this last week! End of term duties here at Valley Forge and our celebrations of Nativity on Sunday, not to mention re-organizing and re-writing Unlocking Harry Potter: Five Keys for the Serious Reader for the wizard at Zossima Press to send off to the printers, have kept me from the fun here! God allowing, I’ll post something brief more often as we prep for exams at school.

Today’s exciting news is that Travis Prinzi edited his podCast interview with Wendy B. Harte and myself that we did on western New Year’s Day. I hope I didn’t say anything especially bone-headed or, if I did, that Travis was able to cut it out during the edit. Please write out below all the mistakes you think I made!

I drove to Boston this weekend for Nativity services at the St. John Chrysostomos Mission in Saugus (if you live up that way, you really should go). My daughter Hannah drove the minivan with my wife co-piloting, so I was in the back with the other six children. What a hoot! We listened to Order of the Phoenix tapes (Scholastic, Jim Dale) and I was delighted by several inspirations about the Disillusionment Charm (and postmodernism), the Thestrals (and existential epistemology), and Voldemort’s narrative misdirection (and Rowling’s much bigger twist) that I look forward to sharing with you at HogPro.

Thank you for stopping by — and Merry Christmas!

Post-posting: If you haven’t been following the comment boxes on Dragon’s blood, you’ve missed a few more references from canon. Fascinating that Dragon’s steak has healing properties, no?

Soon after Zossima Press published the first edition of Hidden Key to Harry Potter, I received a call from a man in Bellingham, Washington, about the book. This man, Don Holmes, was a retired Christian book distributor for stores throughout the Northwest US and western Canada. He still delivered books “across the border” once a month though he was in his seventies so he could visit with friends in those stores. One of the books these courtesy drives brought to his attention was Hidden Key. My email and street addresses were in the book so he looked me up. Bellingham is only a ferry ride and short drive from where we lived on the Olympic Peninsula. [Read more…]

‚Hogwarts Professor.com‚ was born in 2004 as a place I could post articles I was working on or pieces I had written in my capacity as HogPro at Barnes and Noble University‚ (BNU) Harry Potter classes. I neglected it for months at a time when I was working on other things or was between BNU courses. This negligence led to complaints and suggestions in my in-box that I needed to update the articles there, take them down, expand and publish them, or just do something! I finally asked Erick to take down all the articles last Spring when I started re-writing them as a book. Over the summer I edited a collection of essays by five Harry Potter mavens that was published as Who Killed Albus Dumbledore? (Zossima Press, 2006) and drafted Unlocking Harry Potter: Five Keys for the Serious Reader. [Read more…]