The second of two collections of scholarly essays I’ve co-edited with Dr. Amy H. Sturgis is now released: Star Wars: Essays Exploring a Galaxy Far, Far Away was published in July by Vernon Press and is now available in hardcover and e-book formats! (See below for purchasing info and a discount code.) The first of our co-edited collections was released in May: a “twin” volume to this one, dedicated to Star Trek (check out my blog announcement with all the details on that volume by clicking here.) And importantly, you’re invited to some fabulous, virtual book launch events to celebrate! See below for all the details.
About the book
The book is a collection of ten essays exploring Star Wars from many different angles: from the evolution of how Twi’leks are treated in the franchise (and what that says about Star Wars‘ relationship to “the Other”) to how Star Wars and Harry Potter use similar storytelling devices to set their heroes on their destined paths, to the invented languages of Star Wars, to the way Star Wars tie-in media (books, comics, etc.) has developed over time and why that’s important. These essays are engaging, insightful, accessible, and as up-to-date as we could possibly make them, with significant treatments of new shows like Andor and The Book of Boba Fett. It also contains a beautiful foreword written by Ian Doescher, author of the Shakespearean Star Wars adaptations (which are brilliant, in case you’ve never read them).
I’m particularly excited about this book’s release because not only was I the lead editor for it, I also have a chapter in the book on a topic I am very passionate about: the influence of an obscure, 1964 art-house film, Arthur Lipsett’s 21-87, on Star Wars. In my chapter, I demonstrate how the central message of Lipsett’s film–a dire warning about the encroachment of technology on humanity’s ability to connect with nature, each other and the divine–becomes a central concern in all eras of Star Wars storytelling, from A New Hope to The Bad Batch and Andor (especially Andor!). Check back on the blog for more posts about Lipsett’s work and its importance to Star Wars that follow on from my chapter in the book.
Christmas in the Harry Potter saga is always special. In an already magical world, the Christmas scenes in Potter (always snowy!) bring a heightened sense of magic to the story, bordering on the religious. It’s telling that the story finally drops its first and only overt references to religion—two Christian scripture passages—on Christmas in the Godric’s Hollow churchyard scene in Deathly Hallows. Each and every Christmas, Harry somehow gets a glimpse of the type of hero he must become to solve the problem at hand, and that problem is always Voldemort: the problem of sin and death itself. Funnily enough, Christmas, in the Christian sense of salvation history, also manifests the hopeful beginnings of the solution to the problem of sin and death. This is no coincidence. At Christmas, Harry often receives important gifts to help him in his quest, just as humanity received the gift of Jesus Christ, the light of the world, to help and guide us on the way to eternal life. The gifts and lessons Harry receives every Christmas show him that his own heroism must be patterned after this same Christ in his incarnation: God who becomes human, to show us that true honor, true heroism and true godliness lie in humility and loving friendship.
As a writer, I spend a lot of time editing other people’s work. As a college instructor, that means commenting on student papers with the goal of eliciting stronger, clearer, better supported and thus more effective writing. But I also review and edit the work of adults writing in professional settings. Regardless of the writer’s age or place in life, I see many of the same mistakes and weaknesses.
I’ve been asked a few times recently if I would articulate some basic advice for the benefit of those who’d like to strengthen their writing (especially those who will face my own red pen at some point in the process). So here we go. I’ll aim this toward prose writers (academic and non-academic), although some of the principles will apply for fiction and perhaps even poetry. And I’ll try to keep it succinct, in the interests of proactively following my own advice:
This past weekend, over 100 Potter scholars from all over the world attended the 9th annual Harry Potter Academic Conference, hosted by Chestnut Hill College. The conference was a great success by all accounts, and now that it’s complete, I thought I’d share my conference offering: a digital paper on the way all the many food images in Harry Potter point to the Eucharist. Please enjoy this with a hot glass of butterbeer! (And if you have a recipe you like better, please post in the comments.)
Emily’s conference talk for the 2020 Harry Potter Academic Conference at Chestnut Hill College
Hope to see you (digitally or otherwise) at next year’s Chestnut Hill Harry Potter Academic Conference. Until then, let’s all try to manage the mischief, shall we?
October has proven a productive
month for my scholarship! This month I’ve had two articles (both which were a
long time in the making) published in separate peer-reviewed academic journals,
I’ve just returned from presenting at an academic conference and I’m beginning
work on an essay that will be included in an exciting new scholarly collection.
As a (perhaps) not-so-lame excuse for why I’ve been too busy to post new
content on this blog, here is a short description of each of these projects and
how to access or find out more about them. Thanks for indulging me in a little
horn-tooting!
First, my essay “Harry Potter and
the Sacramental Principle”
is included in the October 2019 edition (volume 93) of the journal Worship, “a peer-reviewed, international ecumenical
journal for the study of liturgy and liturgical renewal” (from the Worship website). This journal was
founded in 1926 by one of my personal liturgical heroes, Virgil Michel, OSB,
who brought to the blossoming liturgical movement its distinctly American
contribution: the notion that the liturgy, if consciously and inclusively
celebrated, could bring about profound social regeneration. I’ve had long
conversations with Virgil Michel in my scholarly imagination, and it was a
thrill I will not soon forget to see my name in the pages of the journal he
founded.
My essay details how the depiction of magic in Harry Potter rests conceptually on the same notions about reality that undergird the sacramental life of the Church: that God’s abiding presence is shot through the world around us, if we have eyes to see (just like that “hidden in plain sight” quality of the magic in Harry Potter). Pastorally, the essay urges those in ministry to employ this aspect of the series – and its profound influence on rising generations – to help renew a sacramental imagination in our age. Worship is a print-only journal, so check out your local academic library for a copy, or subscribe through their website. (For those more casually interested, I gave a shorter version of that essay to Ohio State’s Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies’ 2017 conference, Popular Culture and the Deep Past, and you can watch that nutshell version here.)
Second, my essay “Dobby the Robot: the
Science Fiction in Harry Potter”
appears this month in the special Children’s Literature edition of Mythlore, “a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal
published by the Mythopoeic Society that focuses on the works of J.R.R.
Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and the genres of myth and fantasy”
(from the Mythlore website).
It is a great honor to be included in this volume, which also features essays by my friends and fellow speculative fiction scholars Katherine Sas and Kris Swank. And the great news for us all is Mythlore is an open-access journal, so you can access the entire contents of this volume right here. Previous issues are also available.
The “Robots” essay makes an argument that the overriding conceptual source informing house-elves, those beloved yet controversial creatures in Harry Potter, is the trope of the created servant (often expressed as robots) in science fiction. You may think I’ve branched a little far from my focus on the religious themes in literature with this essay, but traditionally, robots as a trope of classic science fiction (and, I argue, house-elves in Harry Potter) seldom appear without invoking thorny ethical questions regarding personhood, free will and human dignity – questions too often relegated to religious discourse. (See this previous post for more.) Also, in researching the history of the robot trope, I discovered its Western origins in Jewish legends of man-shaped automata termed Golems, created to demonstrate a particular rabbi’s mystic holiness. So robots have religious origins as well as invoking questions that interest scholars and adherents of religion. I hope you’ll read my sprawling argument that Dobby is really just a robot in disguise and tell me what you think.
Next, on October 18, I presented my thoughts on the Harry Potter books verses their film adaptations at the 8th annual Harry Potter Academic Conference, hosted as always by Chestnut Hill College outside Philadelphia, PA. (My talk was an expanded and reworked version of this blog post from Hogwarts Professor.) It was a lovely, all-too-quick weekend, as usual, with highlights (for me) including Lana Whited’s talk on dragon and Phoenix imagery in The Crimes of Grindelwald, Travis Prinzi’s look at the allusive relationship between Potter and the old movie Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Katy McDaniel (host of the academic Harry Potter podcast Reading Writing Rowling)’s look at fan maps as doors to the sacred imaginative spaces created by stories like Harry Potter. (My unofficial favorite moment of the conference was a pumpkin-ale-fueled incident between Laurie Beckoff and Caitlin Harper after the conference which we are now terming “The Great Ron Row of 2019”. Details are hazy, but it suffices to say some people admire Ron Weasley more than others do.) As usual, I can’t wait to return to Chestnut Hill in 2020.
photo courtesy of Louise Freeman
My work is cut out for me upon returning from Chestnut Hill, as I was delighted this summer to have my proposal accepted for a chapter in The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter, Volume 2, edited by Dr. Lana Whited of Ferrum College and published by University of Missouri Press. My essay will consider the various parenting styles and relationships in Harry Potter from perspectives of both psychology and religious studies. In the end I hope to show that religious metaphor is the interpretive key to unlock the meaning of these relationships and their influence upon the narrative. But more than that I shan’t say until the thing is written! Stay tuned for a publication date in 2020.
Thanks for allowing me to crow a bit – a fitting activity, perhaps, for this spooky month. Thanks especially to those who have supported me in any way – from allowing me to drivel on at parties about my latest project to dialoguing with me to help make my arguments stronger or better supported to sharing your own Potter ideas. 50 points to your House, whatever it may be!
The Hogwarts Express has come and gone, taking our magical children back for another exciting, evil-defeating year of enchanted education. We Muggles, left behind in this sometimes depressingly mundane world, must fend for ourselves, training our eyes (those windows to the soul) to seek out the magic that lies just under the surface of all things, for in that sparkling, numinous presence lies the true nature of existence, and our true purpose: to live like Christ – that is, to live for others, and in so living, never to die.
Well, that’s how I
see Harry Potter anyway.
But the pastor of a Catholic parish in Nashville, Tennessee disagrees. According to this article in the Tennessean, he has removed all the Harry Potter books from the new library at his parish school this fall. I’ll set out his reasoning (as reported in the article) and give my rebuttal, just like it’s 2002. In so doing, I hope also to demonstrate in some small way what Pope Francis has called the evil of clericalism – that is, any undue emphasis on the opinions, attitudes and actions of clerics over those they are meant to shepherd, simply because they are clerics. In my opinion, that is the real evil which underlies this particular situation.
Last year, my father died on the
day before Ash Wednesday. He was 85 years old, and he’d lived a wonderful,
respectable Christian life, full of charity toward others, including prison
ministry in his retirement. He’d enjoyed a fulfilling professional career, been
a good friend to many, and was happily married for over 50 years to a wonderful
woman with whom he’d raised a big, happy family. Letting go of this kind,
funny, intelligent and loving man was hard and sad, but something about it also
felt right. It was Dad’s time, and
we’ll all have our time.
Ash Wednesday invites us all to reflect on “our time” – to remember that indeed our time approaches, even if still far off. We wear ashes on our foreheads to symbolize, as a recent NPR article put it, that we are all “dust-creatures”. There is an impermanence to our earthly lives that we must never forget, lest we fail to live lives of charity and love with every breath. Psalm 95 says, “If today you hear God’s voice/harden not your hearts,” for tomorrow, you may be gone. On Ash Wednesday we remember that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.
I just stopped reading a blog piece I was interested in because the author used the word “literally” twice, both superfluously, before the third paragraph had ended. I mean, I literally stopped reading. Literally. Stopped.
But how else can I stop, besides literally? If I had done anything but actually stop reading, then I would use another word or phrase, such as “slowed down”, “took a break from” or “read with less interest”. But I stopped reading, which means my reading ceased, it came to an end.
Friends, we have a problem with the word “literally”. We have become utterly addicted to throwing it into sentences. Its overuse knows few bounds. I hear my college students overusing it, I hear adults overusing it, I hear second-graders overusing it. I went to an academic conference last month where it was so overused that at one point during a mid-afternoon breakout, I had the following text exchange with my colleague who sat next to me: Continue reading “Literally, stop saying “literally””
I’ve been a blur of preparations this week for the city of Roanoke, VA’s Generic Magic Festival (copyright protections prevent them from hosting a “Harry Potter” festival, so instead we’ll celebrate the spirit of those books in a generic way), to which I have been invited to give a talk about robots. Yes, I said robots. I am a liturgist and Church musician, and I’m traveling 6+ hours this weekend, missing both Masses I play for, to talk about robots. (Actually, it’s also about the house-elves from Harry Potter, and how they act a lot more like robots than elves.)
I’ve been a blur of preparations this week for the city of Roanoke, VA’s