O'Brien on the New Götterdammerung
via Reading for Believers this new discussion by Michael O'Brien on the most recent peril to young people's souls.
While it happens that I tend to agree with the thrust of his criticism -- the transmutation of vampire from horror to suffering wimp and romantic victim--I have a lot of difficulty with the "support" lent to the argument.
I have said consistently, and will continue to say, that there is nothing like a guiding adult hand to help a child through literature. If some books are "off-limits" because of potential peril to the soul, they become the forbidden fruit that will eventually undermine faith. A friend of a friend once commented to me, not entirely accurately, but certainly with a scintilla of truth, that the great problem in the history of the Jewish people is that the insistence on education often led to people smart enough to abandon the faith. (It's the latter part of the statement--whether smarts equals leaving faith--that I question.) However, if we teach our children how to read and then do not encourage them to do so broadly and deeply and show them how such reading is not a "challenge" to faith but an opportunity to exercise it, well, we are missing out on a grand opportunity.
Certainly, one must be cautious about what is introduced and when. One doesn't present Lolita or Justine to a kindergartner. But as regards Twilight and its ilk, while I don't care for them myself, they are a wonderful gateway into all sorts of literature and discussion--they are not the trap-door that will inevitably open the chutes straight into the netherworld.
While it happens that I tend to agree with the thrust of his criticism -- the transmutation of vampire from horror to suffering wimp and romantic victim--I have a lot of difficulty with the "support" lent to the argument.
I have said consistently, and will continue to say, that there is nothing like a guiding adult hand to help a child through literature. If some books are "off-limits" because of potential peril to the soul, they become the forbidden fruit that will eventually undermine faith. A friend of a friend once commented to me, not entirely accurately, but certainly with a scintilla of truth, that the great problem in the history of the Jewish people is that the insistence on education often led to people smart enough to abandon the faith. (It's the latter part of the statement--whether smarts equals leaving faith--that I question.) However, if we teach our children how to read and then do not encourage them to do so broadly and deeply and show them how such reading is not a "challenge" to faith but an opportunity to exercise it, well, we are missing out on a grand opportunity.
Certainly, one must be cautious about what is introduced and when. One doesn't present Lolita or Justine to a kindergartner. But as regards Twilight and its ilk, while I don't care for them myself, they are a wonderful gateway into all sorts of literature and discussion--they are not the trap-door that will inevitably open the chutes straight into the netherworld.
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