Hogwarts Professor

The talk yesterday at Princeton Theological Seminary was a lot of fun and the costumes at the Fantasy Ball last night were awesome (I especially enjoyed the ‘Snitch and Seekers’ performance unit, Tumnus the Faun, Holly from LEP Recon, and Gandalf the Grey). Their questions and the consequent conversation were great, as you’d guess. But, in honor of yesterday’s talk, late night, and drive back and forth, I’m giving myself the day off from hard core posting — so here are the contents of my mailbag! [Read more…]

4:00 pm, Monday, 16 March 2009, Princeton Theological Seminary, Stuart Hall, “Subversive Fantasy: J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter, and the Inkling Tradition”

7-9:30 pm, same night, Trinity Episcopal Church (Princeton), ‘The Grand Fantasy Ball,’ a Gala Event

6:00 pm, Wednesday, 18 March 2009, Twin Ponds Integrative Health Center (628 Twin Ponds Rd, Breinigsville, PA 18031), ‘Calories and Carbohydrates versus Communion: The Three Essential Differences between Traditional and Modern Ways of Understanding Food.’

2:30-4:00 pm, 27 March 2009, St. Emmelia Orthodox Homeschooling Conference, Antiochian Village, Ligonier, PA, ‘Harry Potter’s Bookshelf: The Great Books Behind the Shared Texts of Our Times‘

8-9:00 pm, 27 March 2009, St. Emmelia Orthodox Homeschooling Conference, Antiochian Village, Ligonier, PA, ‘Fostering the Life in Christ: Four Steps to an Orthodox Homeschool’

I’ll be speaking in Danielle Tumminio’s ‘Christian Theology and Harry Potter’ class at Yale’s Saybrook College as well early in April but it is a closed seminar (and I do more listening there than talking; I really do wish you all could come or that I could pod cast the conversations for you to enjoy).

10:30-11:20 am, 23 April 2009, Augustana College Convocation, Rock Island, IL, “From Muggle Lead to Spiritual Gold: The Literary Alchemy of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter Novels.” (I’ll be speaking about “C. S. Lewis’ Vision and Seeing Eye” at a church in Rock Island that week as well, details to be nailed down, and at two other places in Chicago-land that weekend which I’ll post specifics for here as I learn them myself!)

Summer Conventions: I’ll be a Featured Speaker at Leaky Con 2009 in Boston, 21-24 May, where I’ll be talking about the Eyes of Deathly Hallows, at Summer School in Forks in (duh) Forks, Washington 25-28 June, where I’ll be talking about Harry’s Influence on Bella’s Tale, and at Azkatraz 2009 in San Francisco, 17-20 July, where I hope to be talking about Harry Potter’s Bookshelf because Penguin/Berkley will be rolling the book out along with the HP6 movie. [Read more…]

What is the meaning of the Deathly Hallows final words, “All was well”? Was Ms. Rowling referring to a favorite author or poet in choosing them?

For serious readers of Harry Potter, these are important questions, right? I’ve taken some long looks at this previously and the best I came up with was Eliot’s “All shall be well” in The Four Quartets which, in turn, is an echo of Julian of Norwich. Odd Sverre Hove in Bergen, Norway, rocked my world Tuesday in finding what I think is the more likely source of Ms. Rowling’s fare-well “All was well.” [Read more…]

What happened? Where did HogPro go?

Long story short: the company that holds the domain name, in Keystone Kops fashion, sent notices that our annual fee was due to an email address of a school where I used to work. When I didn’t pay the bill I didn’t know I had, they turned off the lights. Then, when they turned the lights back on, they pointed the site to their servers which hosted the site way back when (until May 2007). Hence the old school look the last few days. When they finally pointed the site at our server somewhere near New Delhi, it then took 72 hours for restoration of the site on the web. Allentown and Spokane came online again Monday afternoon; Seattle, Rochester, and Connecticut had been up days earlier. Go figure. I have tried to post since but bugs in the machinery eat the posts before they get to the screen.

Anyway, thank you to those who wrote, to the friends who figured out what was happening and fixed the problem, and to those who held my hand and endured my fits of impatience during Clean Week while we waited. It’s good to be back — and about time for me to finish off the ten part series comparing the critical reception of Harry Potter and the Twilight Saga. Tomorrow, though, a real find by Odd in Scandanavia — the probable origin of the “All is well” finish to Deathly Hallows in a story-ending by one of Ms. Rowling’s favorite authors. Stay tuned!

This is Travis Prinzi, writing a quick note to let you know that Hogwarts Professor seems to be back in working order, for everyone except the Hogwarts Professor himself. Hopefully, John will resolve his access issues and be back to blogging in no time!

Hope you enjoyed a few days of the old school, green HogPro site, and the 2007 interlibrum predictions.