Trelawney's Crystal Ball
Predictions for 2024
Dear Friends,
One of the more delightful things about J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series is her relentless lampooning of the subject of “Divination.” Which is, of course ironic. We were led to believe (by people who never read the books) that she was encouraging kids to practice real witchcraft and dark magic; in actuality, in the magical world of Hogwarts there is nothing to commend fortune-telling, palmistry, tea-reading, astrology, crystal-gazing, and so forth. Professor Sybill Trelawney is an obvious old fraud, excepting the two instances of genuine prophecy over which she has no actual intent or agency. Predicting the future, as Hermione Granger observes, is “a lot of guesswork, if you ask me.”
Long time readers know that events over the last seven years—starting in 2016—has dampened my enthusiasm for making predictions. As a serious matter, I am out of the prediction business. But it is still fun to play around with prognostications from time to time, isn’t it? You just have to keep a giant salt shaker in hand—well, you would if you were a superstitious pagan. I don’t know what the Christian equivalent of that expression would be. Oh, right: “Thy will be done.”
So with all due humility and trust in God’s providence, here are some predictions for 2024. Mind you, these are not necessarily things that I wish to happen. Just things I think are more or less likely to happen.
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