I think the His Dark Materials books are only anti-Catholic/Christian if you choose to read them that way. They can be read as an allegory about power and institutions more generally. (Although I'd managed never to encounter the concept of the Fall as a positive thing until Pullman, and it blew this good little Christian's MIND. Fantastic stuff.)
I'm half way through Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger. I'm not usually a fan of her books as I find them melodramatic, but this one's beautifully written and pure, literary gothic. Loving it. I need to get more books in audiobook format - I can enjoy reading again that way.
I think the His Dark Materials books are only anti-Catholic/Christian if you choose to read them that way
Hasn't Pullman said explicitly that he meant them to be an indictment of the Catholic Church?
Oooh, it IS Halloween! I should pull out Hill House and give it a good reading tonight.
I'd managed never to encounter the concept of the Fall as a positive thing until Pullman
There is a really good Harlan Ellison short story on this theme. The title escapes me, but perhaps someone else will remember.
In my cataloging class yesterday, we were discussing relational databases, and I brought up LibraryThing. Turns out the only people who were familiar with LibraryThing in my class were me and the teacher, so I spent my break showing some of my classmates my list of books over there. That made me realize how long it'd been since I last updated it--I have to work on that soon!
I think Ishmael looks at The Fall as a positive thing.
Is Intentional Fallacy why, when Georgia O'Keefe says they're Just Flowers, it's OK to laugh?
was amused by Catholics getting all huffy about it.
Yes, it's pee-in-your-pants HILARIOUS when people object to their faith being skewered.
Pullman never names a specific Real Life faith in any of the books or makes a direct correlation to the Catholic faith. Catholics can make that correlation all they want, but the books are pure fantasy.
eta: by which i mean that even as a someone who heavily studied religions, i never grokked the series as an attack against a belief system, but against a superpowerful Oligarchy using an ancient belief system to do terrible things to people, and that it is a good thing for people to question what they are being told in the name of Faith...which i consider to be true for every belief system.
Pullman never names a specific Real Life faith in any of the books.
Yes. Because, as you say in the very next sentence, the books are fantasy. C.S. Lewis named the lion Aslan and not Jesus, and yet people get that Aslan is a Jesus figure without him being specifically named as such.
as a someone who heavily studied religions, i never grokked the series as an attack against a belief system
Many other people (I don't mean Buffistas, though several certainly have), however, did read it that way, and if Pullman himself said that he wrote it that way means that the interpretation is, at the very least, extremely viable.
