Susan Cooper's The Dark Is Rising

I have spent much of this afternoon reading Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising for my class tomorrow morning. And I'm having a hard time collecting my thoughts about it somehow. I'm not sure exactly what I want to say about it beyond the obvious. I am interested in how religion and Christianity are dealt with in the novel, but I can't really synthesize it in a way that makes sense to me. I suppose that my sense is that in the novel good and evil (here the Light and the Dark) are clearly distinguished, but defy equation to religion generally. I guess that want I'm saying is that in the world Cooper writes, the Light seems to transcend Christianity. What I find strange is that Cooper still deals with Christianity. For example, one central scene takes place in what is clearly an Anglican church on Christmas day (see, the whole English thing is important again). I'm just trying to write my way through my ideas. This is one novel that I had origninally intended to write on in my dissertation, but as my dissertation grew, it was pruned away. My diss was plenty long without having to look at Cooper. Still, I'm interested in her work, The Dark is Rising sequence in particular, and my thought is that I want to start working on an article dealing with Cooper.