Recently, I had a student in class ask my opinion about whether Christians should read fictional series like Harry Potter. This has been an issue I’ve thought through before. Growing up, I remember hearing people in my church say that the Harry Potter books were from the Devil and that Christians should not read them. At the time, I did not pay much attention to the debate because I was not particularly interested in those books anyway. Easy to avoid the controversy when you didn’t care one way or another. As I grew older, however, I became much more of a reader. I now try to read every day and enjoy a wide variety of genres. Since I graduated from seminary, I have significantly increased my fiction reading and have worked through the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (John Carter), J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter), and Rick Riordan (Percy Jackson).…