Hogwarts Adjusts to New Realities

“I am so glad I’m not taking Divination anymore!”

Hermione had just come down from the girls’ dormitory into the Gryffindor common room. She plopped down into a squashy armchair next to Harry and Ron, looking thoroughly disgusted.

“Look at this,” she said, flipping open her laptop and clicking the tab for Divination. Since her family were muggles, she had adjusted more quickly to laptops and cell phones than most of the students from wizarding families. “See?” She pointed to the screen. “Leave it to Trelawney to come up with only one Student Learning Outcome: ‘Gain access to the inner eye.’ What is that supposed to mean?”

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college life, silly

Communio Sanctorum

When I was a child, my family usually attended church on New Year’s Eve, and during the service the pastor or an elder would read the “necrology”—the list of those from the congregation who had died in the last year. It was a way of taking stock, marking the passage of time, meditating on the reality that “Hours and days and years and ages swift as moving shadows flee,” to quote a somber hymn we would sometimes sing. I also seem to recall that babies baptized that year were duly accounted for, although their names seemed to weigh feather-light when read against the gravity of the saints departed.

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liturgical year, spirituality, theology
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