This is me in a nutshell...
First and foremost, I am a Christian. I believe Christ is the only way to be 
who are always there for me when I need them :)
My list wouldn't be complete without my addiction to Starbucks coffee. I have come to love upside down carmel macchiatos or vanilla soy lattes for cold weather, and shaken black tea lemonade or blended strawberry lemonade when it's hot. 
is "it" in a nutshell :)
I don’t know if it’s actually 'anti-Christian' so much as 'anti-Catholic Church'. I don’t know for certain because I’ve only read the first two books so far. I’d heard really good things about them over the past couple of years (general, "you should read these" recommendations from various places, including an acquaintance who likes good, edgy young adult fiction, and who I think of as a pretty conservative Christian guy), so I put them on my wish list and got them for Christmas a couple of years ago from my brother. I finally got to the first book early this year, and I did like The Golden Compass quite a bit, even though I wasn’t taken by Pullman’s prose, especially much of his dialog, which I found to be very simplistic and uninspired. You do sort of expect simplistic writing with some children’s/young adult books, but the odd thing about the two books I’ve read were that while they fit into the typical young adult dark fantasy genre with the young protagonist(s) undertaking an adventurous quest and overcoming various obstacles, there are really more disturbing, adult plot themes, like the tyrannical, all-powerful "Church" who is more powerful than the government of the world, which is an Earth parallel (think Spanish Inquisition-era Catholic Church and you’re probably not far wrong), and the sinister things going on that involve the Church and children (among other things). But being an adult, I didn’t really find it all that shocking, just kind of odd, and I decided that all in all it was a pretty good story with some cool things going for it, and the only reason I didn’t move right on to the next book was because of the quality of the prose, or lack thereof, IMO.
But I did pick up The Subtle Knife a few months later, and *that’s* where I started going, "huh?" as I was reading. I mean, it started out all right, introducing a new protagonist this time… a boy in present-day England. Will meets up with Lyra, the protagonist from the first book, by way of this little doorway–one of several that that connect to parallel worlds, and together they try to solve the problems presented in that book… which are even kind of more bizarre than the first book. Just as an example, one of the disturbing things that happen involves the knife mentioned in the title. This knife apparently "chooses" who is to wield it by cutting off two fingers of the one it chooses, which is what happens to Will. And then, the wound won’t heal until he finds the one person who amazingly has some special ointment. And that person turns out to be his father, who he’s been searching for throughout the book, because had disappeared right after Will was born, and who it turns out happened across one of those parallel world doorways into Lyra’s world and then couldn’t find his way back to Earth. By the time Will and his father run into each other at the end of the story, they only have enough time for him to cure Will’s hand, and explain that the knife is to be used by Will in a war against God, and then his father is killed by another character for this really ridiculous reason. By this point, I was really just kind of dumbfounded over how bizarre the story had gotten, and I really had no desire to pick up the third book anytime soon.
Q:You have run into criticism from certain religious groups who regard you as subversive, with the Catholic Herald describing your work as 'worthy of the bonfire.' Do such emotional responses concern or upset you or does it please you to generate strong reactions?
A: I'm delighted to have brought such excitement into what must be very dull lives.
Q: How do you respond to the claim that your books are anti-Catholic and promote atheism?
A: In the world of the story — Lyra’s world — there is a church that has acquired great political power, rather in the way that some religions in our world have done at various times, and still do (think of the Taliban in Afghanistan). My point is that religion is at its best — it does most good — when it is farthest away from political power, and that when it gets hold of the power to (for example) send armies to war or to condemn people to death, or to rule every aspect of our lives, it rapidly goes bad. Sometimes people think that if something is done in the name of faith or religion, it must be good. Unfortunately, that isn’t true; some things done in the name of religion are very bad. That was what I was trying to describe in my story.
