A note with follow-up from Peter Barber about the core issue and victory depicted as story transparency in the Hogwarts Saga (shared with his permission):

Dear Dr. Granger,

I’ve a problem with your reading of Harry Potter which I hope you will consider.  I notice you make great moment of the binary love versus death, whilst I’m convinced you’ve missed Rowling’s intended binary of love versus violence – the refusal of reciprocity (turning the other cheek) – which is indispensible to our Lord’s manifestation of love, and is that which conquers death.  I feel you’ve left a critical piece out of the puzzle in this regard, amounting to a misrepresentation of the essential theme of this narrative which ties it most directly to the Love of the Father in the Gospels, in Jesus Christ.

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Yesterday I shared some exchanges I had with Augustana students last months after I spoke to their class at a weekend retreat, a retreat I should add whose three days quite deliberately and successfully mirrored the three stages of the alchemical work, and, incredibly, were something of a Ring Composition, too. Today I want to dump the April mailbag upside-down and share the exchanges I have had with virtual strangers, folks that write after reading something here at HogwartsProfessor.com, who have attended a lecture, or those who accept the invitation to write I make in each of my books.

That means this collection doesn’t include my almost daily exchanges with the other Hogwarts Professors and my longer if less frequent email to old friends and professional acquaintances (which categories tend to elide, praise God). My guess is that the ommitted writing of this sort out paces reader-audience mail at something like a 10:1 word count ratio.

I was startled when putting this together last night, though, by the number and variety of Christians who have written me and by the height and depth of the questions and comments. I note this here as fair warning to anyone not interested in Christian topics or who might be put off by Paschal greetings (Christ is Risen!) repeated frequently. So warned, please choose to peruse my April correspondence as you will. All names, of course, have been reduced to initials at the least and identities obscured as necessary. My thanks to those who write and to you for sharing your comments below.

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I get a lot of mail from readers and from folks who have heard my talks. I delight in that and its the reason I beg readers at the end of every book’s introduction to write and pass out my business card at lectures I give. Correspondence means a continued conversation and, inevitably, I learn more from those who write me than they get from me.

Tomorrow I will post a selection of letters I have received in the last month or so to give you a taste of what pops up in my inbox. It’s a full range — from the occasional nutter who thinks I’m not fit to kiss Ms. Rowling’s feet to the graduate student who thinks I am insensitive to the mentally handicapped. Today, though, I want to share the questions from one class of students at Augustana College. I was privileged to speak at their retreat held in the castle of Stronghold Conference Center (foto above) in Oregon, Illinois, earlier this month. [Read more…]