A New Christian Everyman
The Hidden Key to Harry Potter
by John Granger
Zossima Press, 2002
(384 pages; $18.95, paper)
reviewed by Robert Trexler
Until now there have been two Christian evaluations of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels. Some see the books as an introduction to selfish, if not satanic, practices, and others see them as having a moral, if not Christian influence. The Hidden Key to Harry Potter presents a third: Harry Potter is neither dangerous nor only potentially edifying but the Christian “everyman,” the author writing explicitly Christian fiction after the fashion of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R Tolkien. John Granger makes the astonishing claim that Potter’s popularity “results from the vicarious joy we experience with Harry as he seeks his symbolic perfection in Christ.”
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Robert Trexler is the editor of CSL: The Bulletin of the New York C. S. Lewis Society.
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