Harry Potter

And Then They Came for J.K. Rowling

“It takes a great deal of bravery to stand up to our enemies, but just as much to stand up to our friends,” says Albus Dumbledore in an address to the Great Hall in J.K. Rowling’s The Sorcerer’s Stone, the first book in her fabulously successful Harry Potter series. I confess I don’t know who … Read more

Myth and the Desire for the Transcendent

There is within our present society a profound and pervasive sensitivity that something is amiss, a deep and desperate yearning for things higher than our modern materialistic society has within its power to offer. Burrowed in the innermost secret place of every man and woman there is a sense, an inherent knowledge, that much of … Read more

Faith, Reason, and Fantasy

“The road to fairyland is not the road to Heaven; nor even to Hell, I believe, though some have held that it may lead thither indirectly by the Devil’s tithe. ”  So wrote Tolkien in his essay “On Fairy Stories.” This single sentence in brief summarized the whole of the controversy in religious circles over … Read more

Ending Income Inequality?

Benefiting from a hint from an article titled “Is Harry Potter Making You Poorer?”, written by my colleague Dr. John Goodman, president of the Dallas-based National Center for Policy Analysis, I’ve come up with an explanation and a way to end income inequality in America, possibly around the world. Joanne Rowling was a welfare mother … Read more

On Giving Scandal

A reader writes: I was recently thinking about the prayers for Bin Laden — and felt I had butted up against the scandal of the Gospel. Specifically, I found it difficult to pray for Osama Bin Laden after his death, because I felt that lots of people would, and why should this mass murderer who … Read more

The Pro-Life Leader Who Is Also an Exorcist

Having just read Rev. Thomas J. Euteneuers’s new book, Exorcism and the Church Militant, one of the first things I asked him was whether he was afraid of demons. I shivered more than once reading through its short chapters, arranged as basic questions about the devil, demons, possession, and the rite of exorcism. “Not at … Read more

‘Hating Films For All The Wrong Reasons’

Jeffrey Overstreet, of the Looking Closer blog, is one of the film critics I look to with great regularity, particularly when it comes to identifying and analyzing the more “spiritual” components of cinema. (His book “Through a Screen Darkly” examines the ways in which “artists – whether they know it or not – have captured … Read more

Growing Pains

  There are a few times in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian when the Pevensie children have trouble getting their heads around the changed landscape of Narnia. Having spent a year back in England as adolescents, they return to Narnia to find that 1,300 years of history have passed, and their skills are needed … Read more

Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials

This past winter, the illustrious and venerable New York publishing house Alfred A. Knopf published the third and final volume of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. Its title is The Amber Spyglass, and it runs 518 handsomely laid-out pages. The English-born, Oxford-educated Pullman had earmarked his first two volumes for the “young adult” market, … Read more

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