Leave it to LifeSite News to keep the blame on the Harry Potter series for children being drawn into the “language and mechanics” of the occult. Conflating correlation and causation again, I see.
I suspect the fascination children have with the occult has to do with the disintegration of moral and metaphysical structures that marks our postmodern condition; the pillars of permanent meaning seem no longer to stand, and yet the call of the supernatural continues to echo in our hearts. We long for a world more than material, and religion doesn’t have the cultural sway it once possessed. So the search goes elsewhere, even to the occult. The fascination with the occult is a symptom of a deeper yearning. The Potter series stands in success above other books of magical themes because it deals with the permanent things, the things LifeSite News claims to advocate, like parental love, sacrifice, and virtue.
My wife and I watched The Savages over the weekend, a film staring the marvelous Laura Linney and Phillip Seymour Hoffman as siblings thrown into caring for a dementia-suffering father who cared little for them. The siblings are both artists of the theater, hopeful for grants that will enable them to write. They’re intimacy with the dramatic arts gives them little closeness with human nature. The very idea is lost to them in a wind of a father’s abuse and a mother’s abandonment. They grew up without the benefits of parental love, and it shows. But so far as the film shows, they didn't read Harry Potter. Whew.
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