WARNING: SPOILERS ARE INCLUDED IN SOME OF THESE LINKS!
Here’s Christianity Today‘s Ted Olsen on the wide range of evangelical-Christian reactions to J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. Meanwhile, most of the Catholic blog-coverage has treated the arrival of The Deathly Hallows as a a reason to celebrate. Mark Shea has catalogued many posts on the subject, and in our occasional conversations over lunch he enthuses about the books with gusto. Here’s Amy Wellborn‘s post, with an array of readers’ comments.
And then there’s Jimmy Akin, whose perspective is closer to my own. I just don’t care for Rowling’s writing. Sure, it’s whimsical and inventive. But eventually, the stories just start to feel redundant, and I grow weary of tales about children breaking the rules, being rewarded, and then accepting apologies from the ignorant grownups. But I’ll defend the goodness of her subject matter and her fairy-tale¬†genre without hesitation. And Ross Douthat is disappointed in the story for the same kinds of reasons that I bailed out on the series a long time ago: He’s frustrated by the predictability, and by the wild array of rather arbitrary magic spells that make the storytelling more and more problematic and implausible.