By Joshua Hollmann and Honor Students of Concordia College New York Wes Anderson is a designer of cinematic worlds of meaning. I recently taught the seminar “The Movies and Meanings of Wes Anderson” for the Fellows Honor Program at Concordia College New York. The course is related to my forthcoming book Theology and Wes Anderson for the…
LUCIFER and the Female God
By Princess O’Nika Auguste Lucifer is one of my favorite current television shows. It has everything that someone could want: humor, horror, magic, romance, and action. Lucifer focuses on Lucifer Morningstar, the Devil himself, who has abandoned his role as Ruler of Hell because he is bored and unhappy. He also leaves Hell to defy his father, God….
Avatar The Last Airbender: Neutrality, the Sacred, and Political Responsibility
By Corey Patterson Few television shows stand the test of time as eternal icons. Rarely do people across all age groups connect with a story that reflects our deepest fears and most extravagant hopes. But Avatar: The Last Airbender is no ordinary production; it’s a modern mythology that speaks to the need for political responsibility…
Watchmen and 2020 Politics
Hello everyone! Recently, I was invited by John Anthony Dunne to join him on The Two Cities podcast to discuss HBO’s Watchmen series. The podcast is about 48 minutes. We discuss the original Watchmen graphic novel and the politics of the Cold War, the Watchmen TV show’s intersection with our current political climate, and we…
Halloween (2018) in the Age of #MeToo
By JR. Forasteros Is there a more-maligned genre than horror? When master of horror fiction Stephen King won the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, a Yale professor complained, He is a man who writes what used to be called penny dreadfuls. That they could believe that there is any literary value…
Calling All Saints: We Need a Lent for Halloween
By Danny Anderson Growing up a low-church Protestant, I had a tragically shallow liturgical education. When I moved to New York City in my mid 20s and first saw Catholics with ash on their foreheads on that particular Wednesday, I was utterly confused and thought I had wandered into an episode of The Twilight Zone. For…
Sometimes Dead is Better: Pet Sematary and Some Halloween Easter Reflections
By Danny Anderson Is it going too far to call Pet Sematary an Easter movie? Hear me out. First, let’s admit up front that Kevin Kölsch and Dennis Widmyer’s 2019 adaptation of Pet Sematary doesn’t explore the depths of human grief that it’s source material does. Stephen King’s 1983 novel is a classic work of…
Who Has a Problem with Evil? Halloween, Fascism, and Theodicy
By Danny Anderson Ted Bundy is once again having a moment. The current interest in his story can be traced to two new productions: Netflix’s four-part documentary series Conversations with a Killer, and the film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil, and Vile which recently premiered at Sundance and stars Zac Efron. The critical conversation around the Efron…
Analyzing Religion in Jonathan Hickman’s POWERS OF X #1
Hello Everyone! Our friends over at Sequart are doing a blog series analyzing Jonathan Hickman’s current run on Marvel Comics’ X-Men, starting with the House of X/Powers of X series that kicked it off. We previously posted a link to the analysis of House of X #1 here. The writer, David Canham, gives a thorough…
An Investigation of Character: 12 REASONS WHY I LOVE HER and Bahá’í Dating Culture
By Ron Lapitan “This is a good one. I read it before I started dating the girlfriend I’m seeing now,” said the cashier at the comic store as he rang me up for the romance graphic novel, 12 Reasons Why I Love Her by Jamie Rich and Joëlle Jones. People often think of things as…
