Word: potterer
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...numbers are nice, of course: the American Library Association ranks the Harry Potter books as the most challenged in the country; more parents have requested that Harry be banished from bookshelves than they have Huck Finn, more than Catcher in the Rye. Conservative Christian parents have argued that the books promote witchcraft and Satanism; a student in Houston had to get up and leave the room every time the teacher read aloud from Harry Potter. But even that ruckus has calmed down or come to stand for a much larger conversation about what should shape the moral life of children...
...fade as fads. The charge, which given the mass popularity is typically made rather quietly, is that the stories are formulaic and conventional. The attack came first and most famously from stuffy Yale professor Harold Bloom, keeper of keys to the literary kingdom, who dismissed the first Harry Potter book as thin and derivative in a 2000 article in the Wall Street Journal and has since refused to look at any of the sequels. "I would think in another generation or so," he told TIME, "Harry Potter will be in the dustbins everywhere. It will be period-piece rubbish because...
...lives," notes Ebony Thomas, 25, an English teacher at Cass Tech High School in Detroit. "Before, those choices might have been dictated by church, by family, by community; now you have to face that alone, and the choice lies within yourself. This is a generation that really needs Harry Potter...
...much to embrace the popular culture and use it for missionary purposes. On the one hand there are those who share the view of Jack Brock, pastor of the Christ Community Church in Alamogordo, N.M., which made worldwide headlines for its "holy bonfire" in December 2001, in which Harry Potter was among the books burned. The incident was taken out of context, says Brock. "The media made me look like Hitler." But that said, he still would do it again. "They [the books] are totally, completely, entirely about witchcraft," he told TIME. "The next book, I understand, will...
...American bishops, puts the books on its recommended list for children. Ministers preach sermons likening Harry's running through the wall of Platform 934 to a leap of faith. "We're missing something if we can't tell stories from the Bible as compelling as Harry Potter," says John Fleming, minister of First United Methodist in Henrietta, Texas. Many have found embedded in the books all kinds of biblical imagery. "If you read these books carefully, they are not only not evil, they are profound stories about good, and they are deeply religious," argues Baylor University philosophy professor Scott Moore...