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I'm with you Fintan. I was raised Catholic, but converted to Protestant when I married my husband. Our whole family are active Christians, and not just on Sundays. We read these books, and we recenlty saw the movie. We love them both! We read books with our kids,.. we all shared a love of reading. We read mostly fiction.

This was a well thought out article. I appreciate your posting it. Thanks. I noticed this quote at the end (I agreed with what so many of different faiths had said, but this one held importance to me, and I'll explain why after I re-post it.)

"These books clearly delivered moral lessons that would be attractive to people of many different faith communities," the rabbi said. "They speak of the power of love, right and wrong, and the power of our choices to determine who we are. They exalt human virtue."

I mentioned before that after seeing the movie, our 6 year old grandson said: "Daddy is was so neat, it was all about love and justice".

Thats what we thought too. We saw a TON of great moral lessons in this. It was just good fun,..and it is so wonderful to see movies coming out that we can go and enjoy with our grandchildren. We hope this becomes a trend!!! We can't wait to see "Lord of the Rings"..and we hope that books like "The sword of Shanara" and others by Terry Brooks, become movies.

Again, thanks for one of the most balanced and well written articles on this subject to date!!

Like you, I also feeel this was a well written article.
And, by the way, I just got back rom seeing the movie today. I'd say it was very good, but not "excellent" (though I also loved the books).

My take on the anti-"Harry Potter" side is that they're not anti-HP per se, but have a message they want to get out about the scarcity of Christian Values in the mass media in general, a message with which I and many others tend to agree with to differing extents.

The current hype surrounding Harry Potter makes it a great vehicle to get their message read. It's just good marketing ... when HP excitement wears down, you'll see the same message attached to anti-"Lord of the Rings" posts or whatever future movie will garner interest.