Transfiguring Transcendence in Harry Potter, His Dark Materials and Left Behind
Fantasy Rhetorics and Contemporary Visions of Religious Identity
by Mike Gray
Three recent and commercially successful series of novels employ and adapt the resources of popular fantasy fiction to create visions of religious identity: J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, Phillip Pullman’s Dark Materials and Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ Left Behind series. The act of creating fantasy counter-worlds naturally involves all three stories in the creation of what Mike Gray terms “transfigurations of transcendence”: hopeful albeit paradoxical encodings of the ambiguous, non-observable reality whose primary locus in modern society is the societally extra-systemic human individual. Popular fantasy fiction turns out to involve acts of world-creation that are inherently religious and inherently paradoxical.A substantive examination shows that all three are involved in more or less intentional re-narrations of traditional Christian beliefs and narratives.
Three recent and commercially successful series of novels employ and adapt the resources of popular fantasy fiction to create visions of religious identity: J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials and Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins’ Left Behind series. The act of creating fantasy counter-worlds naturally involves all three stories in the creation of what Mike Gray terms “transfigurations of transcendence”: hopeful albeit paradoxical encodings of the ambiguous, non-observable reality whose primary locus in modern society is the societally extra-systemic human individual. Popular fantasy fiction turns out to involve acts of world-creation that are inherently religious and inherently paradoxical. A substantive examination shows that all three are involved in more or less intentional re-narrations of traditional Christian beliefs and narratives. The atheist His Dark Materials series does not deny but re-imagines the Christian visions of selfhood; the traditionalist Left Behind series does not simply replicate but modifies its own declared values; the apparent secularity of the Harry Potter series is shaped by its creative reception of Christian patterns and narratives. While the stories’ visions of selfhood clearly clash, the basic paradoxes involved in their struggle to articulate transcendence expose significant parallels and a productive conversation with the Christian tradition. It is not simply that popular fantasy fiction is theologically relevant – the Christian Heilsgeschichte, too, proves to be highly relevant in popular culture. However, while far from obsolescent, models of religious identity in contemporary society require criticism and creativity – and, as evinced most powerfully in the Harry Potter stories, a flair for constructive engagement with paradox.
- By (author) Mike Gray
"If readers are interested in doubling their appreciation for the literature of pop culture and how that literature can be investigated for its theological substructure, this tome is indispensably instructive." -- Dr. Jim West, Zwinglius Redivivus
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Volume 1
Governing Cemeteries
State Responses to the New Diversity in The Netherlands, Norway and France
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The Spaces of Others – Heterotopic Spaces
Practicing and Theorizing Hospitality and Counter-Conduct beyond the Religion/Secular Border
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Dance as Third Space
Interreligious, Intercultural, and Interdisciplinary Debates on Dance and Religion(s)
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Der Fremde in der europaischen Karikatur
Eine religionswissenschaftliche Studie uber das Spannungsfeld zwischen Belustigung, Beleidigung und Kritik
Volume 11
Calling Bodies in Lived Space
Spatial Explorations on the Concept of Calling in a Public Urban Space
Volume 27
Alltag mit kunstlichen Wesen
Theologische Implikationen eines Lebens mit subjektsimulierenden Maschinen am Beispiel des Unterhaltungsroboters Aibo
Volume 3
Stuck in the Margins?
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Volume 31
Deconversion
Qualitative and Quantitative Results from Cross-Cultural Research in Germany and the United States of America
Volume 5
Secular and Sacred
The Scandinavian Case of Religion in Human Rights, Law and Public Space
Volume 15
Raum und Geist
Zur Erdung und Beheimatung der Religion - eine theologische Asthetik des Raumes
Volume 7
The Kingdom of God and the Poor
The Bible Reading of the Economically Underprivileged Christians in Tanzania
Volume 36
Verortet: Kirche und Liturgie im Wandel
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Robinson Crusoe Tries Again
Missiology and European Constructions of 'Self' and 'Other' in a Global World 1789-2010
Volume 9
Redeeming the Sense of the Universal
Scandinavian Creation Theology on Politics and Ecology
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Lived Religion and Lived Development in Contemporary Society
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