I hadn’t planned to spend a decade re-reading and re-re-reading the Harry Potter books.

Truly! People assume that because I co-created a podcast about the boy wizard that I must be a huge fan. But the truth is that I started to think of Harry Potter as a sacred text because I didn’t have any other.

Sitting in my Introduction to Hebrew Bible class in Divinity School, I studied the epic tome with interest—but also a real sense of distance. Sure, it was interesting to notice how Genesis tells two totally different creation myths within its first few pages, but the Bible just didn’t feel like it was mine. I didn’t grow up with it. I only knew the basic plot lines… So, who was I to interpret it? To play with its meaning?

Exasperated, I asked my favorite professor, Stephanie Paulsell, what I might read to ask big questions about how to live when the the Bible seemed so dead to me*. In her wisdom, she pointed me to an essay by renowned atheist Philip Pullman, the author of His Dark Materials, called The Republic of Heaven.‍

Instead of the Kingdom of Heaven, Pullman argues that because God has died, it should now be a republic—and in this republic, we need to find new myths that help us make meaning of life—new stories that we might live within.

And the source of these myths, these grand narratives that will shape the future of human society?

Children’s stories, he says.

In ages gone by, when we lived with the clarity of a shared religious worldview, Pullman argues, “we were part of a huge cosmic drama.” In Britain, that was the function of Christianity. It involved “a Creation and a Fall and a Redemption, and Heaven and Hell. What we did mattered, because God saw everything.” But now, “one of the most deadly and oppressive consequences of the death of God is this sense of meaningless or alienation that so many of us have felt in the past century or so.”

That shared myth is gone.

And so, Pullman argues, we must counter this sense of meaningless by claiming the beauty of the world through the simple stories we tell our children. We must turn to narratives that help us “see this real world, our world, as a place of infinite delight, so intensely beautiful and intoxicating that if we saw it clearly then we would want nothing more, ever. We would know that this earth is our true home, and nowhere else is.”

We learn how to live when we read books where characters wrestle with good and evil. And perhaps, in a world of so much adult complexity, only children’s books have the courage to name what is right and what is wrong.

That’s what studying the Potter books so closely over these last years has felt like: an exercise in finding clarity amidst complexity. Yes, there are endlessly intricate plot details and a hundred different takes on character motivations, but what the story ultimate teaches is the power of love.

The transformative love of a parent for a child (Lily!), the enduring legacy of unrequited love (Snape!), the solidarity that comes with the love of friends (Hermione, Ron and Harry!), and indeed—what the absence of love can do to the human soul (Mouldy Voldy!)

Mind you, Pullman might not wholly approve of the wizarding world as a moral text. Not every book gets his approval! Both Louisa May Alcott and J.R.R. Tolkien are on the chopping block…

Speaking of Tolkien’s magical world, he writes, “Such fantasy is both escapist and solipsistic: seeking to flee the complexities and compromises of the real world for somewhere nobler altogether, lit by a light that never was on sea or land, it inevitably finds itself enclosed in a mental space that is smaller, barer, and poorer than reality, because it's sustained by an imagination that strains against the world instead of working with it, refusing and not accepting.”

Indeed, in Tolkien’s fantasy world, where do babies come from?!

“No, if the republic of Heaven exists at all, it exists nowhere but on this earth,” writes Pullman, “in the physical universe we know, not in some gaseous realm far away.”

That’s what I’ve always loved about the Potter books. The wizarding world, as the French poet Paul Éluard would say, may exist in another world—but it is the same world as this one.