This quote from, Looking for God in Harry Potter (second edition), by John Granger (yes, Granger):
"'He understood at last what Dumbledore had bent trying to tell him. It was, he thought, the difference between being dragged into the arena to face a battle to the death and walking into the arena with your head held high. Some perhaps, would say that there was little to choose between the two ways, but Dumbledoor knew - and so do I, thought Harry with a rush of fierce pride, and so did my parents - that there was all the difference in the world.' (Rowling, Half-Blood Prince, 512)
"If the reader wants to believe in an existential fatalism, something like Harry sitting at the window staring into the darkness and doubting the arrival of his deliverance, rather than in mortal virtue and heroic choice of the good, that reader is fighting the tide of Rowling's message. The human heart thrills in resonance to Harry's heroic decisions - decisions made (until Dumbledore's revelations at the end of Order of the Phoenix) without knowledge of his destiny. Readers around the world share his programming, it seems, to the tune of more than 300 million copies [as of the publishing date of 2006] of Harry's stories being sold. If this is only a matter of programming, there seems a prevalent programming in the human person for sacrificial, altruistic, loving service that loyalty to the local gene pool does not explain. Why do we thrill to Harry's choices if they're just a function of his being the boy born to be 'kind?' (see http://www.mugglenet.com/jkinterview.shtml)
"The answer to this question brings us to the Christian meaning of choice and change in Harry Potter. Harry, it turns out, has a larger-than-life destiny (vanquish Voldemort; save the world). But he can only realize this destiny by making the right choices and becoming the sort of person - an embodiment of love, the power the Dark Lord knows not - able to defeat the Dark Lord."
Consider the influences these books have had and will have on a generation?
