What Do I Think of Harry Potter?

 This was composed as an in-class essay for my 8th-grade Humanities students of 21-22. They were allowed to collectively come up with any four questions they wanted me to answer, from which I would select my favorite and write a one-hour reply. The question selected was "What do you think of the Harry Potter books?"

Most people have heard of the “elephant in the room.” That is, something that is well-known to everyone involved, but too embarrassing or prohibited from talking about. Some elephants, however, are too big to ignore. One of these elephants is the publishing phenomenon of J.K. Rowling—the Harry Potter series. Since 1998, Harry Potter has sold over 500 million copies (that’s one book for about every thirteen people on the planet, by the way). It’s been made into a play, eleven blockbuster movies, and enough themed parks, stores, and tourist attractions to fund a small country. No matter what you think of Harry Potter, it’s too big to ignore now.

Book of the Month January 2023: The Didascalicon of Hugh of St. Victor

“Learn everything; you will see afterwards that nothing is superfluous.”—VI.iii

This month was a tough pick. Honorable mentions go to both Cicero’s De Senectute and Littlejohn and Evans’ Wisdom and Eloquence. But the winner for the top book is Hugh of St. Victor’s Didascalicon.

I’m a teacher, which makes me a sucker for books on teaching. Hugh, along with Quintilian and John Milton Gregory, is one of the best. He was the head instructor of a small but famous community—St. Victor’s—just outside of medieval Paris in the early 1100’s. His Didascalicon de Studio Legendi (translated as something close to “The Compendium of Teaching of the Study of Reading") focuses on the foundations of learning. What is the purpose of education? What are its essentials? How should these essentials be imparted to others? 

Commonplaces--January 2023

 “To me nothing whatever seems lengthy if it has an end; for when that end arrives, then that which was is gone; naught remains but the fruit of good and virtuous deeds. Hours may pass, and days and months and years, but the past returns no more, and what is to be we cannot know. But whatever the times given us to live, with the same we should be content.”—Cicero, De Senectute xix

“For even if the allotted space of life be short, it is long enough in which to live honorably and well. But if a longer period of years should be granted, one has no more cause to grieve than the famers do when the pleasant springtime passes and summer and autumn come. For spring typifies youth and holds forth the promise of future fruit; while the other seasons are designed for gathering those fruits and storing them away. And this same fruit of old age, as I have often said, is the memory and abundance of blessings previously gathered.”—Cicero, De Senectute xix

“But the most desirable end of life is that which comes while the mind is clear and the faculties are unimpaired, when Nature herself takes apart the work she has put together.”—Cicero, De Senectute xx

“Only the person who bows down and worships is wise. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. After all, and note this, because He is God, a necessary limit has been imposed on the omnipotence of God in his work of creation: God cannot create gods. That would have meant cancelling out his own unique being God. Thus a contrast, specifically a contrast of subordination, of inferiority, of a lower order, had to remain between God and his highest creature. Only in the image of God, not as God, could the rational creature be created. And it is from this contrast between God and the creature as not-God that all the anxiety of the broken moral life emerges.”—Kuyper, Common Grace II