Sacred Practices with Harry Potter
Virtual Class

Course Description:

Weekly Sacred Reading Practices with Harry Potter:

Gather with Vanessa Zoltan (co-host of HPST and author of Praying with Jane Eyre) weekly beginning this summer for an hour of sacred reading in community. We’ll start off with a grounding practice and then turn our attention to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, applying varying sacred reading tools such as sacred imagination, lectio divina, and floralegium. This class will mostly be in a large group, with some opportunities for small group time. But this class is really just about developing the muscle of sacred practice. We will be steeped into a rigorous ritual, in community, for an hour each week. We'll use this time to practice reading toward kindness and courage in our own lives.

Note: If you’re new to our work, we condemn JKR and her transphobia. Read more about it here. This class, like our other programming, relies on Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone as a communal reference point, but in none of our work do we position the series or JKR as moral authorities. Instead, by rigorously discussing the text, noting the ways it falls short or reads differently with our adult eyes, and processing these observations in community, we aim to use our relationship with the series to perceive how we’ve developed and thereby better orient our own moral compasses.

Faculty bio:

Vanessa Zoltan - Instructor - she/her

Vanessa Zoltan is CEO of Not Sorry Productions. She is the co-host of three podcasts: Harry Potter & the Sacred Text, The Real Question and Hot & Bothered. She is also the founder of their pilgrimage project: Common Ground. Vanessa is trained as an atheist chaplain and has her MDiv from Harvard Divinity School. She also got her Masters in Nonprofit Management from the University of Pennsylvania and graduated with a BA in English from Washington University in St. Louis. She worked in the education sector for 10 years. She is the author of Praying with Jane Eyre; Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice (Penguin, 2021) and has been published in The Paris Review, Salon and other publications. Her work has been covered on CNN and in The Washington Post, The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe and many other sources.

The overview:

• Tuition:

  • full price: $100

  • can’t quite afford full price: $80

  • full price + contribution to scholarship funds for class: $120

• Dates: Sundays from 6-7pm ET for for 6 weeks beginning on June 18th, ending on July 23rd.

• Recording: Classes will be recorded for later viewing, but the course is best experienced if you attend each session live.

• Scholarships: Because this class is below cost we cannot offer full scholarships but will do our best to honor all offers of partial scholarships, which you can request here. All scholarship applicants will receive registration instructions from courtney@notsorryproductions.com and should pay/register by 5pm, Friday, June 16 in order to participate.

• Questions? Email Lara at lara@notsorryproductions.com with any questions! Please note that this email address could become lost in your spam folder, so it would be helpful if you add it to your address book.