Dear friends,
I recently finished reading the Harry Potter series, which was published between 1997 and 2007. My late PhD adviser Jean Elshtain always spoke so highly of these seven books, and now I know why.
In this essay, I want to share with you some of what I’ve discovered in the Potter universe. Perhaps these reflections will stir up treasured memories for you, or spur you on to read the series for the first time, or simply enrich your own moral imagination. Spoiler alert: I discuss a lot of plot details and endings below. If you want to jump around, I bold the key topics and characters.
For starters, these books deserve to be the best-selling story in history, which they are with over 500 million copies in print. They’re fundamentally about ethics — about good and evil, love and power, loss and resurrection. They speak to the human longing for goodness, joy, and togetherness despite evil, hate, and murder... Read More