To see why, consider this scenario.

The medal of honor is awarded to soldiers who demonstrate extraordinary bravery and courage in battle. It’s a small gesture of appreciation to acknowledge and honor those who risk their lives for their fellows and for the good of society.

Suppose, in the name of equality, the military decided that only awarding the medal to brave soldiers was discriminatory. Why should only brave soldiers have the right to be honored this way? Suppose they redefine the medal of honor to be an honor for all soldiers, just because they are soldiers.

Is it true that the new and improved ‘inclusive’ medal of honor doesn’t affect those men who originally received the medal because of their bravery and sacrifice?

Is it true that making the medal more inclusive has changed nothing important?

Of course not. Because now it’s merely about being a soldier, not being an extraordinarily brave soldier.

Bravery was the whole point of the medal, it was its essence. Without bravery, the honor has no meaning, no reason to exist. In order to be about bravery, it had to be exclusive. Bravery is not equal to cowardice; it’s not equal to mediocrity; it’s not equal to selfishness.

Of course, brave soldiers will still get the award. But only because all soldiers get the award. Bravery is no longer the point. That’s why the new medal is an insult to the soldiers who recieved the old medal becuase of their bravery, and is meaningless to the soldiers who are brave now and will be brave in the future.

Bravery has been forgotten. Society no longer honors and protects it. One little change to the medal of honor to make it more inclusive, to make it equal, has destroyed its essential meaning.

And that is what’s happening with marriage.

The essence of marriage is a sexual union which is fruitful, life-giving, and community-building. The loving union of man and woman alone organically generates families, and no technology can ever replace that.

Neither can gay marriage replace it or be included in it, because no real sexual union even exists between members of the same sex.

To force marriage to include same sex couples is to deny and ignore that exclusive and unique union that only men and women are capable of. And when society turns its back on marriage, it stops honoring the courageous and selfless lives of mothers and fathers.

The only reason marriage has ever existed as an institution was to safeguard, honor, and acknowledge that union through which life itself humanely passes. The institution of marriage, with its legal and social benefits, was the state’s Medal of Honor to husbands and wives. It was their way of honoring that sacred bond which is the root of society. But gay marriage makes all that meaningless.

Sure, men and women will still get married. They will continue to offer their lives in service to society, bringing forth the next generation and courageously raising them. But the unique union between a man and woman will be beside the point. Whatever that new point is, it has nothing to do with life or real marriage.

The value of marital union between men and women is at risk of being forgotten. And thanks to contraception, it largely already has.

Great post. I agree with every single one of your premises, but I’ve come to the complete opposite conclusion about Harry Potter. The HP stories are ambiguous. I think a good case could be made (using your own premises) that there are at least some gnostic undertones running throughout HP. Here’s a basic summary of my case.

Magic

The magic in HP is not magic in the sense of enchantment, wonder, grace, or the supernatural, as it is in Tolkien and in the Christian Fairy Tale tradition. It is just mundane power. As one national writer characterized it, it’s just the flip side of technology in our world. Now I love technology as much as the next guy, but I wouldn’t really say its enchanting and magical in the sense that, say, the gifts from Galadriel to the hobbits are. Now saying that it is just mundane technology and power, is edging it closer to your own definition of occultic magic than literary magic, especially since the HP magic is also frivolous and frightening in that it can apparently do anything to anyone. Historically, technology and magic are related in their love of technique and the quest for power. Therefore, I think the magic in HP is more in line with what C.S. Lewis called the “scientific magician”.
In this respect, it’s interesting to note that in Tolkien, power in both its magical and technological forms are associated with the bad guys (the orcs and their wheels and machines/the ring of power). While the magic of the elves and wizards are more literary devices signifying the magic of divine grace and power.

The Sneer

There’s more going on than just have witches and wizards alongside regular non-magical people. The witches and wizards are glorified while the non-magical folks are derided. This is more a subtext than an explicit thing, but more than one person has noticed it.
Who are the most put-down and derided people in HP? Answer: the Dursleys (muggles) and Filtch (a Squib–a wizard who can’t perform magic). Now add to this the fact that all the wizards treat muggles basically as cute pets, and don’t have any problem with, say, erasing their memories. What you get when you put this together is “the sneer”. People that can do the magic are implicitly better than people who can’t. Even John Granger (the most popular Christian interpreter of HP) admits that all the wizards patronize the muggles.
BTW…I’m not saying Rowling intended any of this, but as Tolkien would say, not everyone has an equal grasp of their materials.

”There is no good or evil, only power and those to weak to use it.”

The cardinal rule of fantasy, according to Tolkien, was that however fantastic the world was, it must adhere to the moral universe. Moral truths are true in all possible worlds. But in HP, the hard line between good and evil are blurred.
The Unforgivable Curses–now there’s something with the Fall written all over it! And yet, both Harry and other “good guys” use these curses quite casually alongside the bad guys. What lesson does that convey, that it’s forgivable when good guys do it?
Remember how killing someone shattered your soul to pieces? Apparently, that’s not *always* true, at least not when you have an “advanced directive” like Dumbledore and Snape had. Maybe your soul is spared when you kill out of love?
Also, is it not a gnostic theme that in your heart of hearts, you are divine? You are pure, no matter what you do? Good and evil are just useless terrestrial concepts, they don’t effect our truly true divine selves. Rowling has defended Harry’s moral flaws by stating that he is a flawed person just like you and me. If that’s the case, is it appropriate for Dumbledore to be assuring Harry about how pure and good he is?

Death

But nowhere is HP so blatantly gnostic than it’s philosophy of death. “To the *well organized* mind, death is but the next great adventure”. That is not Christian, that is gnostic to its core. The whole series is an attempt to tame death, to make it normal, to make it good.
In Christianity, death is evil. When Christ was in his agony in the garden, do you think his reaction to death was the confident, flippant attitude that Dumbledore was always spouting? Or was it more like Voldemort and his perfectly normal, healthy, natural fear of death (because thats the reaction you’re supposed to have to something that is evil)?
Is there not something wrong when the person who exhibits the natural and normal response to death is a character who is the epitome of evil?
The vision of death in HP is the philosophy of death of our culture, it’s the philosophy of the hospices and the people who would kill people like Terri Schiavo.

Conclusion

Maybe it would be too strong to say that HP is gnostic. But at the very least I think we must say that it is very ambiguous. Personally, I want to say that it’s a great work of Christian Gnosticism, but I”m open to argument.

It shows that many writers are motivates by a desire to affect your mind. As a writer, I want my words to literally alter your consciousness. I want to give you a new insight, a new way of thinking about something, a new way of looking at the world. I want you to see what I see, and feel what I feel. I want to change the synapses in your brain, to mold your neurons like playdoh into a new experience. In short, I write to have an impact on you. Is that insane?

Moreover, as a consumer of words or other media, you want an author to affect your mind that way. No one objects to an entertainer taking their mind off things (or putting their minds on things), that’s why people turn to them in the first place.

Of course, this strange madness of the writer is more extensive than the notion of entertaining strictly speaking. It goes beyond the mere desire to help you get on with your chillaxing. As a Catholic writer I might say I want to build up your faith, give you hope, inspire you, or just serve you up a cup of ‘chicken soup for the soul’. But the idea of writing as entertainment does capture nicely something of that impulse to reach out and have an effect on the reader. The entertainer doesn’t do what he does for himself, he or she does it for others. The ‘other’ is the motivating factor not the self. The entertainer needs an audience.

Every writer is in some way an entertainer in that strange symbiosis of writer and reader in the meeting of minds.

Here’s how it works.

Like almost everything else that is a staple of human culture like music, plays, dancing, reading; it all has religious and cultic roots. You might say it’s a part of our vestigial religion. Anyone that has played a lot of sports might have perceived something peculiar about it. A game is basically a symbol of the struggle or battle of life. Through the man-made and arbitrary rules of the game, an artificial and safe environment is created with plenty of contingent variables that allow the players to emulate virtue, to display courage or cowardice, and the possibility is always there to become a hero.

The game becomes a ritual of the hero’s journey, and the players on both teams play the role for each other of demons and monsters that oppose us on the path. It’s a bloodless combat. The fields, the bats and balls, the hoops, these are just the trappings for experiencing the archetypical struggle.

That being said, it makes sense that the players in a great game will get sucked into the drama and the emotion of this ritualized drama. When the balls and sidelines drop out of sight, and what is left is sort of the form of struggle itself acted out in the form of a game (and so somewhat sharing in the sense of woe and importance of anything in life that tests our character), then it’s not exactly a wrong sentiment to think of praying. It’s the right response.

So to be charitable, maybe we shouldn’t interpret the sight of players praying on a field or a court as a sign of presumption that they think God actually has favorite sports teams. And if the player is praying for God to grant his team victory in a commercial/spectator sort of way, we might forgive them for a lapse of sound theology. The deep nature of a game being what it is, we might instead just see the virtue of religion, which correctly leads a person to turn to God for victory in the game of life.

It’s wasn’t just Dumbledore though. The omnipresent presence of ghosts in the hallways (and bathrooms) of Hogwartz, the Death-Day parties, the head master paintings, the veil of death in the ministry of magic, all these things–often through crudity and the ridiculous or comic– attempted to tame death and make it innocuous. “Well, that’s Christian isn’t it?” I can imagine someone asking. Not really. To see why, we need to go to the Garden of Gethsemane.

That’s where Jesus agony in the garden took place. That agony–to refresh everyone’s memory–was in response to Jesus impending death. According to the Gospels, Jesus soul was troubled in the face of others’ death as well, such as the death of Lazarus. But it was with the prospect of his own death that Jesus sweat tears of blood and pleaded with the Father that, if possible, that particular cup be spared him. The reason this is important is because Jesus reaction to death is the truly human one. In fact, it was Jesus’ agony in the garden that proved that Jesus truly had a human will. In the debates about whether or not Jesus had two wills, a human will and a divine will, theologians like Maximus the Confessor saw in this episode in the garden the proof of Jesus’ two wills. In other words, nothing is more human than Jesus’ reaction of fear and dread in the face of death. The Harry Potter character whose reaction to death most resembled Jesus’, was Voldemort–the epitome of evil.

The character whose attitude to death least resembled Jesus’ attitude is Dumbledore. So here is the problem. Knowing what we know about Dumbledore’s manliness regarding death, and his turning his nose down at Voldemort’s running away from death, we can only conclude that if Dumbledore had been in the garden that night of Jesus’ agony, he would have mocked and belittled Jesus the same way he did Voldemort. He would have shook his head in disgust at the sight of Jesus laying there on the ground weeping at the approach of death. “Dont’ you know”, he might of said, “that to the well organized mind, death is but the next great adventure”?

It’s on the Mount of Olives that we see just how much opposition there is on this point between Jesus and Dumbledore. Jesus represents the appropriate human response to death, while Dumbledore represents the HP series as whole and its not-so-human presentation of death. This contrast is important to see because death is one of the primary themes of the series, and many Catholic commentators have claimed that it is a Christian one. When seen through the lens of the Garden of Gethsemane, it doesn’t exactly look like it. But who cares? What difference does it make?

Well, for orthodox Christianity death is evil. It’s an intrusion into God’s creation and his will for human beings. When Jesus, or anyone fears death, he is giving witness that death truly is an evil, because thats how we react to evil. We don’t like it, we avoid, we run from it, we fear it. Jesus agony in the garden was a great testimony that death is truly the enemy of man and the enemy of God. But the message of Dumbledore, who is the wisdom figure of Harry Potter, is that this reaction is foolish. But if its foolish, than death must not really be evil. It’s can’t really be our enemy. Indeed the message of Harry Potter seems to be that death is natural, good, fun (next great adventure and all that), and necessary to our true spiritual development.

That’s the worldview of some religious systems, but it’s alien to Christianity whose hope is in the resurrection of Jesus. Jesus really defeated death, because death really is an enemy. Resurrection is not life after death, its the overturning of death itself. There’s a huge difference. It’s the difference between building hospitals to heal the sick, and creepy spiritualities that would have us hurry along the path of death–that next great adventure. Even though our hope is in resurrection, Christians still avoid death, while people like Dumbledore go in for euthanasia, assisted suicide and dehydrating people to death.

Those who are masters of death in a Harry Potter sense, can arrange for their deaths at the hands of a friend like Dumbledore did with Snape. Why not? Are we not supposed to embrace death like a long lost friend and go off into the sunset like good buddies–arm in arm? Isn’t that what Judas and Jesus did in the gnostic gospel of Judas?

Creepy.

But what about the passage on the tombstone? “The last enemy to be destroyed is death”. In this passage, St. Paul is referring to the resurrection. The resurrection is an anti-death notion, it implies that death really is our enemy. Unfortunately, Hermione redefines it to mean merely living after death. She thus psychologizes the meaning of “enemy” in that passage so that it merely means being afraid of death or running away from it. In other words, an orthodox Christian view of death is turned into the gnostic view of death of Dumbledore and Deathly Hallows.

These monks loved life, and they feared death. Nevertheless, they chose to love to the end. They chose to serve their neighbors instead of succumb to their fears and their natural desire to run away from the situation. They followed the way of Christ who gave everything up–even his to his last breath–out of love. In this view of martyrdom, death is the greatest price to pay for our love and service. Intrinsic to this view of martyrdom is that death is evil. This is the Christian view of death. “O death, where is thy sting?” Death, the last enemy to be put underneath Christ’s feet, death is vanquished by Christ’s resurrection.

Contrast this with the view of death in the Harry Potter series, especially Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. In this series, death is put forth as something that is natural, something that is no big deal, it is good. We are to greet death like an old friend, and walk into the sunset with our old buddy death–into that next great adventure which death supposedly is.

Those who, like our Trappist monks (or like Christ himself), fear death, or shy away from it are to be scorned. That is why Dumbledore is constantly belittling Voldemort for his fear of death and his desire to keep it away. In Harry Potter world, anyone who fears death is being foolish, they are not being mature, they are not in their right minds. “To the well organized mind, death is but the next great adventure” says Dumbledore. For Christians, death really is evil. It really is our enemy and the enemy of Gods good creation and plan for us. But for Potter world, death itself is not evil. In Harry Potter, to destroy the enemy death, is not to vanquish it through Christ’s resurrection, but to stop fearing it. Death stops being an enemy when we embrace death, when we stop running away from it, which is foolish because after all, death is just an adventure.

When the monks embraced their death, they were not putting away childish things. They did not accept death because it’s the gateway into the next great adventure or because it will finally release our immortal soul in to its real life. They were making the decision to love even in the face of the that great enemy and evil–death. The evilness of death is what makes martyrdom. They could have confidence and hope that because Christ walked into that evil and became a curse for us (precisely because he submitted himself to die) and then rose again, that they will too defeat death through the future resurrection. This is not a trivial difference. For Christians death truly is an enemy. It isn’t for Harry Potter. Christian hope is not based on life-after-death, it’s based on the resurrection of Christ. The belief in life after death does not distinguish Christianity from any other ancient religion or philosophy. The resurrection does so distinguish it.

My own former bishop was arrested for trying to import child pornography into Canada. And this is all against the backdrop of the years-long sex abuse scandal and cover up by some bishops, which continues despite attempts to make the problems go away with administrative magic or policy making.

It’s impossible not to see the weak, sinful, human element of the Church today . It’s in our face and on our minds every day. It makes a person wonder if there are any saints left, if there is anyone who is truly faithful to the end, if there is such a thing as an honest and straightforward man.

We want to cry out today those words of the Psalmist: “No one is righteous–not even one”. In this environment, the soul looks for the head of the sick body, for a hint of divine life in this ‘earthen vessel’ which is the Church.

Scandal is a terrible sin because it destroys faith, ruins hope, and dampens charity. It’s a stab in the heart of our neighbor, who needs us for support, for confirmation and for walking together the journey of faith. Let’s face it, we all need role models; we all need to see that someone somewhere has persevered to the end, that there really is someone who both talks the talk and walks the walk. We need role models in the faith, and we need to be role models for our brothers and sisters in the faith. But when we are surrounded by scandal, we wonder: where did the Holy Spirit go? Has he abandoned us? Has he left the Church a long time ago?

One hopeful answer comes from Fr. Barron’s comments on the Holy Spirit in this video.

Fr. Barron reminds us that the three main biblical images of the Holy Spirit–fire, wind, and water–all have connotations of destruction. Fire consumes and burns, it’s heat is painful. The waves of a tsunami destroys everything in its path, and the awful tornadoes of recent days show us the equally destructive power of wind.

If we have trouble seeing the Spirit of God today in the form of holiness and fidelity, then perhaps we can see it in the unravelling of its sins and the bringing to light what was done in darkness. Are those parts of the Church built on sand being buffeted by the Spirit’s winds? Is his fire exposing and burning away the clergy’s sins? Has the Holy Spirit become a purifying tsunami to wash away all the filth? “Your torrents and all your waves swept over me” (Psalm 42).

Fire, wind, and water can destroy, but they also can give life. If we wish to see the end of scandal in the Church, purification and repentance must come first. We must first say “I am drowned beneath your waves O Lord” (Psalm 88). Then after God’s anger washes over us we can return to the Lord saying “I will drink from the stream of your delight” (psalm 36).

And perhaps those of us personally disturbed by all these recent scandals, can vow with ever more determination, to be faithful where others are faithless; too persevere where others give up; and to be a source of hope for our friends, neighbors, and children for generations to come.

Now while Paul was waiting for them at Athens, his spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols. So he argued in the synagogue with the Jews and the devout persons, and in the market place every day with those who chanced to be there. Some also of thw Epicurean and Stoic philosophers met him. And some said, “What would this babbler say?” Others said, “He seems to be a preacher of foreign divinities” – because he preached Jesus and the resurrection. And they took hold of him and brought him to the Areopagus, saying, “May we know what this new teaching is which you present? For you bring some strange things to our ears; we wish to know therefore what these things mean.”

“His spirit was provoked within him as he saw that the city was full of idols”

This is the beginning of evangelization, being provoked by peoples’ need for God. We should be moved, as was Saint Paul, by the presence of so many idols in mens’ lives. On the web too, are all the idols that people have made in the offline world. The web has its dark side, it is a city full of idols, it is full of people who are lost, who are wandering in the dark, who are looking for the news of new things. This should provoke our spirit too, seeing so much darkness, emptiness, and error; we should be moved to bring the warmth of charity, the light of truth, and the fire of the Gospel onto the web.

“So he argued in the synagogue…and in the market place every day”

The synagogue and the marketplace. This is an image of the two directions of evangelization. The intra and extra, the inward facing and the outward facing directions of witness and evangelization. The synagogue represents one’s religious fellows. It’s the “choir” which he have to preach to in order to strengthen and inspire each others faith. As travelers on the Way, we need a boost to our faith, reasons for hope, and examples of faith. The synagogue can also represent our need to enter into dialogue with other religions and with those Christians who are seperated from us. But conversing with our own and with those religiously close to us is not sufficient. We can’t simply preach to the choir or engage in inter-religious dialogue. We must also go out to the marketplace. The marketplace is where we meet those outside of the choir.

You never know what you will find at the marketplace. That Paul was comfortable going to the marketplace to preach and argue show us that preaching the Gospel is not incompatible with the activity of the marketplace. The market is where people shared things, and Paul had news that was too good to keep to himself. Paul’s preaching at the marketplace should also show us that on the Web, evangelization is a form of marketing. The Gospel has no commercial purpose, but if you ignore “marketing” you will not be a very effective evangelist either. On the Web we find both the synagogue and the marketplace. We should be present at both.

“They took hold of him and brought him to the Areopagus”

The Areopagus was the space where people met to hear about new ideas and to discuss and philosophize. It was in that place that Paul made his speech to the Greek Stoics and philosphers. The Web is the digital Areopagus because it’s a global public space where people meet to debate and discuss, to hear and exchange news and share their views and opinions. Like Paul, we must be present there too, boldly announcing our own good news, the reasons for our hope, the “resurrection of the dead”.

“You bring some strange things to our ears”

It was because what the Greeks heard was new and strange that they stopped to listen. This is an important lesson. Paul’s message would not have stood out if he was merely announcing things that were old hat for the Greeks. If he was announcing something that was standard and common, it would not have gotten people’s attention. But things that are strange, things that are different, stand out and attract attention. Pope Benedict implores us to go beyond the formulas of the faith that don’t speak to us anymore, and make them new again. When ways of thinking about the faith become stale, we must make them salt again. Make them seem (apparently) strange so that they reach people’s ears. The Gospel must always be made new to every people and every age so that it can properly challenge them.

So Paul, standing in the middle of the Areopagus, said: “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along, and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, “To an unknown god.” What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you….Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked; but other said, “We will hear you again about this.” So Paul went out from among them. But some men joined him and believed, among them Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris and others with them.

The Altar to “an unknown god”

Aristotle said that a person can not come to what he doesn’t know, except through what he already knows. In other words, in order to teach someone something new, you must relate it to something that they already know. Paul makes use of this fundemental lesson in communication, by beginning his speech about the creator God with a reference to their altar to the unknown god. By introducing the Jewish God by way of something that was already familiar to them in some small way, he makes the transition easier to the newness of his message. This is the mark of all great teachers. Just look at Pope Benedict and the metaphors he uses to teach the faith. Or Jesus and his parables. They start with something people know, and then relate it to something they didn’t know, bringing new understanding. This method works with new media as it does with old media. It’s one of the fundementals of great content creation and an essential ingredient to creating viral content that spreads over the web.

“Some mocked; but others said ‘We will hear you again about this’.

When we go out to the marketplace, online or anywhere else, we must expect to be mocked and ridiculed. This shouldn’t stop us, for some will also say “we will hear more about this”, and others will also believe. We don’t know what seeds are being planted and when they will bear fruit. But if people are mocking, we can be sure that others are secretly desiring to hear more.

“Some joined him and believed.”

Isn’t this the goal of all evangelisation? Only by announcing the good news will people believe and join us by becoming members of Christ’s body. Paul’s preaching at the synagogue, the marketplace, and the Areopagus shows us how to evangelize online. The Internet shares characteristics of them all. If Paul were around today, no doubt he would have been online. How could he not be attracted to all the people there? How could he resist such a global Areopagus? All we need to do is look at his method, and apply it to our efforts online. And if we’re lucky, we will be mocked, but we will also bear fruit.

Are there any other lessons here for Catholic evangelization on the Web?

What do you take away from this account of Paul in Athens?

Your Story is Valuable

All of these stories have an intrinsic value. If anything, the Web has made that more clear. We already knew that people want stories to share and to consume and to tell. We’ve been doing it since people were sitting around fires and writing on cave walls. We can see on the Web in general, how people love to read and consume stories and then to share them and talk about them. This should be even more true for Catholics.

We not only want, we need to hear how faith is alive in the Church. We all need hope. We all want to have our faith supercharged. We all desperately want to be inspired. Remember how we are all one body? The eye wants to know what the foot is feeling. The hand wants to know what the eye is seeing. The tongue wants to know what the head is thinking (sorry St. Paul). Social media makes it possible to share our unique stories. There is more to Catholic web-content then political nastiness and commentary on hot-button issues.

Content is Advertising

But here is the really unfortunate thing for Catholics. On the Web, publishing is publicity. Telling stories is advertising. Putting great content out there for people to share is marketing. If you’re telling a good story, people will share it. When you’re blogging, you are building awareness. When you publish online, you are making yourself more visible. Telling great stories is how you grow. It’s how you get new donors, new converts, new customers, and new retreatants. And it’s much less expensive then traditional publishing. There are no trees to cut down, delivery trucks to distribute your content or middle men and gatekeepers to mess with.

What’s unfortunate is that Catholic groups don’t realize they are sitting on a gold mine. They don’t realize the publicity and awareness that could be created with their stories.  They don’t realize the marketing power of the stories they are keeping to themselves. One of the basic rules of business is that you must differentiate yourself from the competition. It’s called the unique sales proposition (USP). For Catholics who want to build awareness and expand through the Web, you need a unique point of view (UPV).

Your unique point of view comes from what is unique about your business or ministry.  Do you give retreats to young adults? Well you have a unique point of view that comes from your unique experience of seeing first-hand and dealing with the spiritual life of young people. Do you give aid to the Church in developing countries? Only you can see and tell the unique stories of the Church going on there. There is a gold mine in your apostolate, just dig around and find it.

Everybody Wins

Once you have these stories, you now have a social object with which to enter the social media conversation. These unique stories artfully told and properly executed, will bring exposure and awareness to your ministry or business. Your content will have an intrinsic value for the body of Christ, and it will have powerful marketing functions built in that will unfold naturally as people encounter and share it.

It’s a win-win situation. The faithful get the compelling content that they crave, and as they share it you get exposure and the chance to begin a profitable (both literally and figuratively) relationship with a newly growing audience.