Harry Potter and Christian Faith

What does Harry Potter’s Wizarding World have to do with the Christian Faith?

How can we understand the spiritual life of our children better through Harry Potter, his friends, and his enemies?

Calling all Muggles, Residents of the Wizarding World, Parents, Children, Youth, All Adults!

You are invited to join the First Presbyterian Church on Sunday, November 6 to delve into these and other questions. Come to church dressed as your favorite Harry Potter character for the worship services at 8:30 and 10:45 a.m. and Adult Education at 9:30 a.m.

Danielle Tumminio leads us in worship, the Adult Education hour and the confirmation class to talk about the intersection of the Christian faith with the Harry Potter series. “My hypothesis,” Tumminio writes in her book God and Harry Potter at Yale: Teaching Faith and Fantasy Fiction in an Ivy League Classroom, “is that the series does resonate with the Christian worldview, but often these resonances occur in unexpected ways.”

As on example of the intersection between the Christian faith and Harry Potter, Tumminio points to the central place of love in the Harry Potter series. “The one thing with the power to defeat Voldemort’s evil, the goodness to want to, and the knowing to guide the operation is love…In fact, Rowling makes a point of driving home again and again the importance of love as a binding power, a power greater than all others that has the capacity to save.”

Danielle Elizabeth Tumminio is a priest, theologian, a certified life coach and spinning instructor (as in Dervish) and the author of God and Harry Potter at Yale: Teaching Faith and Fantasy Fiction in an Ivy League Classroom. She was the instructor of the “Christian Theology and Harry Potter” seminar at Yale University in the spring of 2008; in 2011, she repeated the course at Tufts University. Tumminio has also presented material on the intersection between theology and the Harry Potter series at the Infinitus Symposium in Orlando, Florida in 2010, the Portus Symposium in Dallas, Texas, in the summer of 2008, and she chaired the panel on Harry Potter and Religion at the 2008 American Academy of Religion conference. Her teaching has been praised by Harry Potter commentator John Granger on his Hogwarts Professor website. She regularly writes for The Huffington Post and The Guardian.