Hi, my name is Vanessa Zoltan and I'm Matt Pots and we are the co-host of Harry Potter and

Sacred Text which we are very excited that you seem to be interested in listening to.

On this podcast we read the Harry Potter books as if they were sacred texts.

What we mean by that is not that we think that the texts are perfect or that we take them

literally but that they can teach us how to be more loving in the world.

Vanessa and I met at Harvard Divinity School where she was a student and I was

a teacher and where I do research on the intersection between literature and religion

and what makes a thing sacred and what the word sacred even means.

And so this podcast is a really great way for us to explore that question.

Yeah and I am a non-genominational chaplain and I am a practicing atheist in whatever that means

but I really do believe that being in conversation with things that speak to us can make us

practice being loving and brave in the world and I think that those are two things that the

world really needs. Part of what I hope we're saying with Harry Potter and the Sacred Text is that

each of us is allowed to pull important lessons from wherever we can as long as we do so with

a critical eye and an open-minded with a heart really leaning towards you know learning lessons

that we want to take out into the world. And I am not an atheist, I am actually a Christian priest

and pastor but I believe all those things that Vanessa just said and I believe that one of the

things religious people really need is to learn how to attend to the sacred better so as to create

a more loving world. And I think that these books and the conversations that Vanessa and I have

and the community that gather around these conversations are some of the best tools that we have

to learn that. Now Vanessa I haven't always been your co-host on this podcast because this podcast

has been around for a while. Yeah we started in May of 2016 and my co-host for the first four and a

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