J.K. Rowling and the Death of Imagination

The faculty of mind liberalism can't survive without.

J.K. Rowling has done more for children’s reading than any other living author, but the work that matters now is her campaigning for women and girls. Such is her fame that a simple message on a social platform reaches millions, and she uses that opportunity to do one thing above all: tell the truth. It’s the sort of work that has earned her vilification from the cultural establishment, and at the margins, death threats from people lecturing others in empathy while extending none themselves.

If anyone has empathy, the capacity to inhabit minds other than your own, it’s the author of multiple children’s books and novels. Rowling can imagine monsters better than most, but she’s also seen up close the ones that appear when others abandon that imaginative faculty.

In her commencement speech at Harvard, Rowling spoke about her time at Amnesty:

“I shall never forget the African torture victim, a young man no older than I was at the time, who had become mentally ill after all he had endured in h…