Why not?
You can use magical "Shield Me against enemies" magic to thwart a melee attack, and you can use mundane "Resist Harmful Magic" skill to resist a magical attack. The rules say you can resist magic with a mundane or magical ability, so I see no reason why you cant resist anything mundane with the same abilities.
The world is magic... if extended then everything is magic, we simply define them in different ways as a mechanism to control them. If my hero wants to use "Shout Loudly" to resist "Death Ray Magic" it makes sense, if maybe a little inappropriate. I think the key to controlling this is improv penalties tho, or it could get out of hand.
As for charms defending... for a practitioner a common magic charm is 'active' and can be used to defend... its only a small step to include any charms, which I think is a neat idea.
Lateral shift...
With the 'attacker vs defender' idea you have to let go of the idea that a set of linear actions are occuring, in a linear time frame. An earlier post pointed out to me that time was flexible in an action, and if you think about the system time is actually redundant... a contest has a goal, when the goal is attained it is over.
An attack vs resistance is actually an exchange and that exchange may take 1 sec or 10 mins, it doesnt matter. And during the exchange both sides are 'active' and able to wield skills and magic actively. Each exchange is simply definded by who has set the goal, not by what they attack with or defend with. To attain their goal they primarily use their selected ability, and this forces a response by an appropriate counter ability, to keep things simple.
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