{"id":1177,"date":"2005-10-12T23:09:26","date_gmt":"2005-10-12T23:09:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2005\/10\/harry-potter-bully.html"},"modified":"2005-10-12T23:09:26","modified_gmt":"2005-10-12T23:09:26","slug":"harry-potter-bully","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/10\/harry-potter-bully.html","title":{"rendered":"Harry Potter, Bully?"},"content":{"rendered":"

A different sort of take on the Potter series, from the Spectator online<\/a><\/p>\n

(I’ve read the first five, but not the latest one.)<\/p>\n

\n
\n

Certainly, Harry has just cause for killing the Dark Lord Voldemort, his parents’ murderer. But Harry and his friends do not have a similarly weighty justification for taking revenge against their peers and others. Despite Christianity Today<\/em>‘s ill-considered baptism of the series as a "Book of Virtues," Rowling’s cultivation of a desire for revenge rather than for justice in her child heroes and readers is enough in itself to render her series both morally objectionable and potentially dangerous.<\/p>\n

But vindictiveness is far from Harry’s only character defect; he is, to put it bluntly, a liar. As previously, in the latest book he tells so many lies that if he were Pinocchio, his nose would be longer than his Firebolt<\/em> broomstick (Half-Blood Prince<\/em>, e.g., pp. 231, 241, 286, 293, 318, 321, 357, 489, 524, 527, 547, 572). And Rowling dutifully labels most of his lies so that even her youngest readers can’t miss it that their hero is a habitual liar. Thus, Hogwarts resembles nothing so much as the Clinton White House. Truth telling is simply not a virtue to be expected of the hero. Instead of a "Book of Virtues," then, the Potter books are a veritable Manual of Prevarication.<\/p>\n

Rowling’s disregard for the virtues of obedience, truth telling, and self-restraint cultivated in traditional children’s literature show that she consciously rejects its moral framework. One of the reasons for this is her stated belief that children are naturally good. As one gripped by this dream of the Enlightenment who, nevertheless, is shrewd enough to observe that schoolboys often lie, cheat, fight, and break the rules, she apparently believes that these things are not real evils. Real evil is murder, especially when based on discrimination by ancestry, and misuse of authority, especially authority over the naturally good children. And the moral instruction children most need is just to see real evil, as exemplified by Voldemort.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A different sort of take on the Potter series, from the Spectator online (I’ve read the first five, but not the latest one.) Certainly, Harry has just cause for killing the Dark Lord Voldemort, his parents’ murderer. But Harry and his friends do not have a similarly weighty justification for taking revenge against their peers…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1177","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nHarry Potter, Bully? - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2005\/10\/harry-potter-bully.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Harry Potter, Bully? - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A different sort of take on the Potter series, from the Spectator online (I’ve read the first five, but not the latest one.) 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1177","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1177"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1177\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1177"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1177"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1177"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}