Christian Allegory In Harry Potter

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Jacob Firestone Mrs. Cronin REL3936-02 2 April 2009 J.K. Rowling Essay As I grew up and matured while reading the Harry Potter books, the underlying themes have stuck out more readily to me. One could just read these books purely for the enjoyment of reading a fantasy, or “fairy story”, as I did when I turned the cover of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, but the fact that there are events that reference stories and morals from the Christian faith in the Harry Potter series is inescapable. “To me, [the religious parallels have] always been obvious,” Rowling said. “But I never wanted to talk too openly about it because I thought it might show people who just wanted the story where we were going (www.christianpost.com).” The Harry Potter series is a great device to use to escape the world around us. J.R.R. Tolkien writes, “The fairy-story is a foretaste of a life that does not consist on ‘endless serial living’ but nourishes ‘the oldest and deepest desire: the Great Escape’- from death itself (dlibrary.acu.edu).” These books are a great way for the mind to take a brief breather from all the problems and stress that are created in the world around us. When you read Harry Potter it frees you from the cling that one has on the world as it is or the idea of the boring disenchanting real world. Harry Potter being a fantasy story gives us the opportunity to let our mind make sense of something that is not in our realm of reality. These kinds of stories let our imagination grab hold of us and take us to a world that only the brain can conjure up. In Tolkien’s Essay on Fairy Stories he says,” The human mind is capable of forming mental images of things not actually present. The faculty of conceiving the images is (or was) naturally called Imagination (On Fairy
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