All media, good and bad….

20 July 2007, 0412 EDT

That highbrow publication, USA Weekend Magazine:

Scores of absurdtie-ins include “If Harry Potter Ran General Electric,” “Looking for God in Harry Potter” and our personal favorite, “Harry Potter and International Relations,” in which the boy wizard is linked to real-life globalization and geopolitical issues.

The bizarre thing here is actually not the criticism-based-on-title of our book (for redux, see Scott McLemee writing at Inside Higher Ed), but the accusation that Looking for God in Harry Potter is nothing more than an attempt to cash in on Potter’s success.

It seems that Jeffrey Resner knows little about the religious controversy surrounding Harry Potter and why so many Christians have felt compelled to weigh in on the phenomenon. The debate over Harry Potter in the U.S. Christian community was, for a time, pretty intense; Conservative Christians remain divided over the books.

Given Potter’s enormous penetration into American–and global–culture, “what to do about Potter” amounts to serious business for conservative Christians. I’d be tempted to dismiss Resner’s mistake as a result of elite media detachment, but I’ve talked to plenty of reporters and critics over the last week who are sufficiently knowledgeable not to embarrass themselves like that.

I, on the other hand, am honored to make Resner’s “personal favorite” for “absurdtie-ins.” After all, who would be crazy enough to think that Harry Potter has anything to do with globalization?

Anyway, I have a piece in The New Republic Online called “How Harry Potter Explains the Word.” (free resistration required.) Check it out, if so inclined.

Dan Nexon

Daniel H. Nexon is a Professor at Georgetown University, with a joint appointment in the Department of Government and the School of Foreign Service. His academic work focuses on international-relations theory, power politics, empires and hegemony, and international order. He has also written on the relationship between popular culture and world politics.

He has held fellowships at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation and at the Ohio State University's Mershon Center for International Studies. During 2009-2010 he worked in the U.S. Department of Defense as a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow. He was the lead editor of International Studies Quarterly from 2014-2018.

He is the author of The Struggle for Power in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires, and International Change (Princeton University Press, 2009), which won the International Security Studies Section (ISSS) Best Book Award for 2010, and co-author of Exit from Hegemony: The Unraveling of the American Global Order (Oxford University Press, 2020). His articles have appeared in a lot of places. He is the founder of the The Duck of Minerva, and also blogs at Lawyers, Guns and Money.