Dark Materials?

Philip Ritchie has an interesting post which summarises an article in which the His Dark Materials series is seen as a concerted attempt to deconstruct and reverse the meaning of the Christian story. My view is that despite Pullman's expressed intention there is more of Christian spirituality in the story than one would expect precisely because Pullman is a novelist first and a polemicist second. Philip thinks that many Christians seem ill equipped to engage in these discussions because of their own lack of knowledge and understanding of the Christian story.

I was discussing with Philip today how the second and third films could continue the story without linking the Church more specifically to the Magisterium and so it has been interesting to read Pullman's own comment on this issue in an online interview:

"As for the "Authority" business, I've always made it clear that theocracy - the political exercise of religious authority, which is what the Magisterium in the story embodies - is a special example of the regrettable tendency of humankind to believe in "one size fits all" answers: to cling to the extreme of dogmatic fundamentalism whether religious or not. In fact (and I've pointed this out too many times to go through it all again) the purest example of theocracy in the twentieth century was Soviet Russia. So I have no problem with the way the film has put the emphasis; it could hardly have done otherwise."

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Rush - Farewell To Kings.