Harry Potter and the Deeper Magic

Three of four members of our household have now read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows -- and that was with a late start, not getting out of the checkout line at the bookstore party until 2 a.m. Saturday.  No spoilers in this post.  But if you're ready to be told a lot, Christianity Today's review catalogs the ways in which the book presents (almost always symbolically) themes that are deeply Christian, most notably the power of sacrificial love.  The review's conclusion:

When C.S. Lewis started out to write The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, he didn't have Christianity in mind. "Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something abut Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tales as an instrument, then collect information about child psychology and decided what age group I'd write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out 'allegories' to embody them," Lewis once wrote. "This is all pure moonshine. I couldn't write in that way at all."

"Everything began with images," Lewis continued. "A faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sled, a magnificent lion. At first there wasn't anything Christian about them. That element pushed itself in of its own accord."

Something similar seems to have happened to J.K. Rowling. She began writing about wizards and quidditch and Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans, and somewhere along the way, Christ began to whisper into the story.

Tom