Book Review by Dorothy Amorella

Parental Guide - Children and the Media

A Landscape with Dragons by Michael O'Brien

Children are spiritual beings having a body and a soul. "Parents must keep in mind that their child is an eternal soul, called by God into a world that is a spiritual battleground."

"Films, videos, and commercial television have come close to replacing the Church, the arts, and the university as the primary shaper of the modern sense of reality. Most children drink from polluted wells which seem uncleanable and unaccountable to anyone except the money-makers."

The symbols in literature have been craftily changed from their traditional metaphors so as to remove their true significance and to replace them with ideas that lead to idolatry and to the denial of the existence of real evil.

"In a seeing-is-believing" culture, which denies the existence of the supernatural world, the tendency is to repress all fears of invisible things. But if a child's fear of monsters under the bed or dragons in the closet always are ridiculed as nonsense, his spiritual guard is in danger of being lowered, with the consequence of his becoming more vulnerable to spiritual evil and less sensitive to spiritual good."

The elimination of what has traditionally represented evil, e.g., the dragon, leads to the elimination of the existence of evil from our consciousness. "Evil is increasingly depicted as a means to achieve a good." The diabolical is glamorized.

"... the Christian "myth" of the dragon refers to a being who actually exists and who becomes very much more dangerous to us the less we believe he exists. The imagination fed on truth knows that the serpent is a symbol of hatred and deceit, of evil knowledge and power without conscience."

"It is the real dragon against which I want my children armed. Their interior life has need of the tales that inform them of their danger and instruct them at deep levels about the tactics of their enemy. It is good that our children fear dragons, for in fearing, they can learn to overcome fear with courage. Dragons cannot be tamed, and it is fatal to enter into dialogue with them."

"Good magic and bad magic in truthful stories correspond to true religion and false religion in our real world. True religion is the search of the soul for God in order to surrender itself to Him, the search for His will in order to fulfill it, the search for truth in order to conform to it. False religion is the inverse. It makes a god out of oneself; it makes one's own will supreme; it attempts to reshape reality to fit one's own desires. True religion is about surrender, while false religion is about control."

© Copyright 2005 Dorothy Amorella.