Zombie guy Clay Morgan on why we’re drawn to death

September 3, 2012 by

CLAY MORGAN posing with the famous University of Pittsburgh Panther, a bronze statue installed in 2001 near the university’s William Pitt Union. In the background is a National Historic Landmark—the 535-foot-tall, 42-story Cathedral of Learning—the second tallest university building in the world.Ever since we published our review of Clay Morgan’s timely new book for small groups, Undead, and followed that with a 3,000-year tour of milestones about zombies, vampires and other ghouls—readers have been asking us: Who is this guy!?! Undead is Clay Morgan’s first book. We think that we’re all going to be hearing a lot more from this talented young historian, writer and Christian educator. So, today, we are publishing ReadTheSpirit Editor David Crumm’s interview with Clay in …

November 2012 Update: As the latest Twilight movie debut nears, Twilight expert Jane Wells publishes a column that includes Clay Morgan’s Undead preview video. Enjoy.

HIGHLIGHTS OF OUR INTERVIEW
WITH CLAY MORGAN
ON ‘UNDEAD’

DAVID: People hearing about your book will think of you as the “Zombie Guy,” so let me start by asking about your day job.

CLAY: My day job is as a college teacher at three different institutions in Pittsburgh, including the University of Pittsburgh. I mostly teach history and political science. I work in areas of sociology, too, and I spend a lot of time looking at what popular culture can tell us.

DAVID: You’re also respected as an expert in leading groups in congregations. Are you ordained?

CLAY: No, I’m a lay person who has done a lot of work in youth ministry.

DAVID: Your publisher is associated with the United Methodist church. How do you describe yourself religiously?

CLAY: I’m a follower of Jesus and I try not to misrepresent Jesus. I’m a writer and teacher so I respect someone like N.T. Wright, who is a brilliant teacher of Christian apologetics, but he is an academic. That’s a different style of writing than what I do. I’m not writing as an academic Bible scholar like Wright. I’m not writing as a theologian teaching high-minded scriptural lessons.

In writing Undead, I wanted a book that can be used in churches that will draw the kind of 20- and 21-year-old young people who walk into my office and say: “We hear you’re a Christian.” And I’ll tell them: “Yes, I’m a Christian.” As we talk, they’ll say, “I thought Christians were …” and they’ll complete the blank with some derogatory comment. I was thinking of that kind of student I see every week when I wrote this book. I think that anyone of any age who enjoys reading the Bible will have a good time with Undead, because I do look at the six individual accounts in the New Testament where people came back to life. I look at this book as enough material for a six- or eight-week series in a small group.

‘LEFT AT A FUNERAL HOME WHEN I WAS 4’

Click the cover to visit the book’s Amazon page.DAVID: Early in your book, you describe your own fascination with death as stemming from an incident early in your life. You write: “My family accidentally left me at a funeral home when I was 4 years old. I was lost, surrounded by strangers in dark rooms.”

CLAY: It’s a family legend now, but it’s a true story. I have two older sisters and back in the ‘80s when this happened, we had a station wagon with an acre of space in the back. I don’t even remember who had died, but my family went for a viewing. When my parents were done, the family got in the car and my sisters led my parents to believe I was in the back of the car. It was just a funeral home with people there for a viewing. I can say that now as an adult, but at the time it was the trifecta of childhood terror. My attention was focused on that body in the middle of the room and I’d been left there alone with these strangers.

I remember that I started crying and a teen-aged cousin helped to calm me down. By the time my parents realized what had happened and they returned, I was sitting on the front steps of the funeral home and not crying any more.

‘ETERNITY IS SET INTO OUR HEARTS’

DAVID: Death has a deep, deep impact on the living. We just wrote about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s interest in spiritualism. He had lost family members around World War I. When someone we love dies too young—crosses over into whatever else is out there after death—that really changes the way we think about both life and death. It certainly transformed Doyle’s life.

CLAY: The historian in me thinks back to the period when spiritualism spiked in America after the Civil War. So many people were dying. Even Mary Lincoln, the president’s wife, had terrifying events in her life and she turned to trying to communicate with one of her children who died. Then, World War I reignited the whole interest in spiritualism for a while. Doyle was in the headlines in that era.

But throughout the 20th century, we’ve managed through technology and improved medicine to increase our life spans. Now, we have this desire to live forever, which is built into us, and we actually think we can do it.

DAVID: That’s a longstanding desire, isn’t it?

CLAY: Solomon said that “eternity is set into the hearts of men.” That hasn’t changed throughout history. What’s changed is that we’re in denial, thinking that we could live forever. We hope that through surgery and supplements and gyms—and all the other things we can do these days—that we can deny death. But the truth is: Nobody gets out of this alive. Thoughts of death produce haunting feelings in all of us.

COMICS CAN CONNECT NEW PEOPLE

DAVID: I was impressed, when I first saw your book, that you clearly love comics. You’ve got some specially commissioned 1-page comics sprinkled through the book. ReadTheSpirit has published quite a few stories about the popularity of comics and graphic novels. You talk about the popularity of “Walking Dead” in your book, which now is in its third season on TV. And “Walking Dead” started as a series of comic books. So, what draws you to comics in this case?

CLAY: Too often, the Bible is presented in a stagnant way. We miss out on so much of the good stuff in the Bible by sanitizing what’s happening in the Bible stories. I wanted people to experience these stories in a modern way. So, I thought: What would some of these stories look like if we showed them in the style of a graphic novel? The artist is Gary Morgan—no relation although we share a last name. He started to play around with these stories in the book and came up with these panels to represent some of them as comics.

Comics appeal to people who might not normally be interested in what goes on in church. Comics can be a way that more people can connect with these stories that are so familiar to us.

DAVID: You even appear in one comic, right?

CLAY: Yeah! I got to step into the action a little bit. Gary did this one incredible page as an introduction that’s Pittsburgh as a zombie apocalypse begins. The skyline of Pittsburgh is there, so I like that. And I’m in there, too.

‘POPULAR CULTURE ISN’T AN ENEMY. IT’S A MISSION FIELD.’

DAVID: Help me sum up the book. At this point in our interview, readers clearly will understand that you’re exploring some eerie material, that you’ve got a good sense of humor and that this is—well, very different than anything else they might have chosen for a small-group study. But there’s a very important message here.

I would describe it this way: If you’re active in a church and you’re seeing all this bizarre stuff out there in popular movies, TV, comic books and popular novels about vampires and zombies and all the rest—you should realize that this is your turf. Don’t look at all the fascination with these eerie tales as something that’s irrelevant, or worse, as something you should reject. This is your turf. Exploring issues of life and death—and what comes after death—is the home turf of the church.

How am I doing? Am I close to a pretty good summary here?

CLAY: That’s definitely a huge part of the take away in this book. The one thing I would add is: This book also looks at the struggles we all face between spiritual life and spiritual death on a daily basis. We all know what it means to feel empty inside. We all crave life. That’s our daily struggle.

People will say: I don’t get the zombie thing. I don’t want to read about all this stuff. That’s not for me. And I do understand that a lot of these movies and TV shows are full of horrific things that some people won’t want to see. I’m not saying, in this book, that we all have to enjoy everything in popular culture. But we do need to understand what’s so popular out there—and we need to ask why it’s so popular, why people are so drawn to it.

A lot of people have forgotten today that when C.S. Lewis first wrote The Screwtape Letters that it really was a pretty shocking story of demons conversing about humans. Christians have read the Screwtape Letters for so many years that we now recognize it as a classic, a masterpiece of spiritual writing. I’m not saying that I’m C.S. Lewis, but I am saying: C.S. Lewis made this connection, too.

Our popular culture isn’t an enemy. It’s a mission field. We can be appalled by what we see out there. We can turn away. Or, we can realize that we all are trying to chase down avenues of rebirth and redemption every day of our lives. And, we can gather together and have some great conversations by looking at all of these stories that are right there everywhere we turn.

BUY THE BOOK: You’ll find UNDEAD: Revived, Resuscitated, and Reborn for sale at Amazon.

FOLLOW CLAY MORGAN: He’s reachable on Twitter @UndeadClay.

Please help us to reach a wider audience

We welcome your Emails at [email protected]
We’re also reachable on Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Huffington Post, YouTube and other social-networking sites. You also can Subscribe to our articles via Email or RSS feed.
Plus, there’s a free Monday morning Planner newsletter you may enjoy.

Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion and cultural diversity.

Let Undead (vampires & more) inspire your church

August 26, 2012 by

The Undead are more popular than ever! On October 14, AMC’s hit series The Walking Dead returns to television for its third season. On November 16, millions will flock to the debut of the Twilight movie series’ Breaking Dawn Part 2. As the fall term begins on college campuses, the elaborate HvZ (Humans vs. Zombies) game—a long-running form of “tag”—will revive again on more than 600 college campuses across the U.S. Never heard of HvZ until today? Serious gamers and college-age adults know about it. In fact, only seven years after its creation, HvZ is graduating to other venues across the U.S. For example, a version of the game will be played at the Escapist Expo, a mecca for gamers in Durham, North Carolina, in September.

Good news for congregations:
This isn’t a taboo topic.
This is home turf for Christians!
In fact, the resuscitation of the dead runs throughout the Bible—most famously Jesus’ own resurrection, of course, but there are many other gripping tales of the dead/undead in the pages of scripture. Historian, college lecturer, author and Christian educator Clay Morgan’s debut book, UNDEAD: Revived, Resuscitated, and Reborn, couldn’t have arrived at a more timely moment in American culture. That’s Clay Morgan’s mantra: Connecting spiritual themes with popular culture to inspire a new appreciation of our religious traditions. That’s also in line with ReadTheSpirit’s own slogan: Spirited Inspiration for a Connected World.

Our recommendation today: Visit Amazon and order your copy of UNDEAD today. Consider organizing a small group to discuss the book. You’ll have lots of fun. We certainly are at ReadTheSpirit!

AND, enjoy our author interview with Clay Morgan.

WHAT’S IN CLAY MORGAN’S STRANGE NEW BOOK: ‘UNDEAD’?

COMICS: The first details you’ll notice when picking up this book are a series of 1-page comics sprinkled among the chapters. These mini tales, drawn in black and white, are perfect for enticing fans of comics (and there are many these days) toward a small-group discussion on Undead. The comics are deliberately left open to spirited debate about their meaning. At right, we’re showing you just half of a 1-page story about a Zombie plague hitting Clay Morgan’s own hometown of Pittsburgh. And, yes, that’s Clay himself looking terrified in the middle of the tale!

From popular culture genres like comic books, Clay Morgan makes dozens of other connections between the Christian faith and pop culture appearances of Undead, Zombies, Vampires and related ghoulish creatures. CLICK HERE to read our second story, today, about some of those pop culture tales.

UNDEAD: ELISHA AND THE DEAD BOY

One of the most dramatic stories from ancient Hebrew scriptures features a grief-stricken mother calling on the prophet Eilsha for help after her child dies. The story in 2 Kings Chapter 4 is as dramatic a scene as anything we might see on Grey’s Anatomy today. The boy dies, the Bible says, but Elisha stretches himself out and touches mouth to mouth. The boy becomes warmer, then coughs and sneezes back to life. Sure sounds like CPR today doesn’t it? To this day, thousands of years later, we still are talking about what happened with Elisha in that bedroom in the Shunammite Woman’s home. Gripping! And that’s just the first Bible story retold in Clay’s book.

UNDEAD: Elijah Shows the Way

Clay Morgan starts with Elisha’s story—before he relates an earlier account involving Elijah—partly because there are more details in the Elisha scene. While the Elijah scene may not be quite as vivid in the 17th Chapter of 1 Kings, Elijah clearly seems to have provided the model of resuscitation that Elisha later would follow. In fact, in the way the Shunammite Woman calls Elisha, we are seeing evidence that Elijah’s pattern was quite well known. People assumed that prophets of God knew how to bring back the dead—and the first step was laying the corpse out on the bed, then calling the prophet as soon as possible.

UNDEAD: JESUS CLAIMS THE MANTLE AND THE FAME

Understanding the close association between God’s anointed messengers and their power to grapple with the forces of death—we see more clearly how Jesus’s miracle working quickly claimed the prophetic mantle. Most people today recognize the name Lazarus. We barely remember the other two very lucky people who Jesus reportedly raised from the dead. (Do you recall them? They’re in Clay’s book along with the other stories.)

Why do we recall Lazarus so vividly? Clay points out that Jesus’s revival of Lazarus must have appeared like something out of a Cecil B. DeMille blockbuster. Lazarus’s story in the 11th Chapter of John makes it clear that his body had been wrapped up and left in a tomb for four days! Not only that, John also emphasizes that people were complaining about the stench—even though Lazarus’s wrapped body was inside a cave sealed with a rock. If that weren’t enough high drama, Lazarus’s miraculous return to life came with him stumbling out of the tomb still wrapped like a mummy. John describes it this way: “The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth, and his face wrapped in a cloth.” People witnessing the scene were so awestruck that Jesus had to remind them to get moving again and cut away the stinking strips of cloth.

UNDEAD: JESUS’S FOLLOWERS DO IT, TOO

“Tabitha get up!” Does that line from the book of Acts ring bells? Peter, the supposed rock on which Jesus established the Christian church, finds himself called in the same kind of tragedy that was a noted specialty in the careers of Elijah, Elisha and Jesus. Clay Morgan’s careful overview of the Tabitha story is an eye opener, indicating that Peter probably was sweating bullets on this occasion. Was his faith strong enough to accomplish this challenge? As it turns out, the Bible says, Peter’s faith brought the dead woman successfully back to life. Most Christians won’t even recall the story of Tabitha, also known as Dorcas. Whether you know the story or not, you’ll see it from new perspectives in Morgan’s book.

And Paul? Of course, Paul also was equal to the challenge of grappling with the dead. Who did Paul bring back from the dead? Here’s a hint: The incident involves a man who did the equivalent of falling asleep in church. Unfortunately, in that jammed Christian gathering 2,000 years ago, he was sitting in a third-story window at the time he nodded off.

No, Clay Morgan isn’t arguing that churches should hang out shingles offering to do the same today. But, these are powerfully enticing mysteries from thousands of years ago. He writes, “What I’m trying to say is that miraculous events of this magnitude probably weren’t much easier to explain in the 1st Century than they are now.” The central lesson Morgan underlines is: There’s nothing taboo in the pop culture fascination with death, the undead and people who somehow inhabit mysterious, miraculous boundaries of life and death. That is bedrock Judeo-Christian culture.

We can bring the whole discussion of the ultimate meaning of life and death right into our congregations, today. And, while we’re at it, questions will arise about other forms of death we all face—like spiritual death and zombie-like depression in times of global anxiety. Clay Morgan is arguing that churches have a whole lot to say about revival and rebirth.

Care for more about Clay Morgan’s Undead?

READ OUR SECOND STORY TODAY: We’ve headlined it simply “Inspiring Zombies and Vampires and Ghouls (oh my!)” In the first story (above) we’ve shown you some examples Clay Morgan highlights from the Bible. In the second story, we look at some of the many pop culture references Morgan explores.

ENJOY OUR AUTHOR INTERVIEW: Meet Clay Morgan in our weekly author interview.

ORDER THE BOOK: Visit Amazon and order your copy of UNDEAD today.

Care for more about Vampires and Bible study?

Click the book’s cover to learn more.ReadTheSpirit publishes Glitter in the Sun: A Bible Study Searching for Truth in the Twilight Saga. You can read more about that Bible study in our earlier ReadTheSpirit story about Twilight. In that story, we explained: There are many connections to make as you enjoy this Bible-study series! According to author Jane Wells, the single biggest connection is: Love. For all of its supernatural trappings, the series has sold well over 100 million copies worldwide because of the compelling quality of the immortal love story at its heart. At the heart of Christian conversion is the search for God’s eternal love, Jane writes.

Please help us to reach a wider audience

We welcome your Emails at [email protected]
We’re also reachable on Twitter, Facebook, Amazon, Huffington Post, YouTube and other social-networking sites. You also can Subscribe to our articles via Email or RSS feed.
Plus, there’s a free Monday morning Planner newsletter you may enjoy.

Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion and cultural diversity.

Inspiring Zombies and Vampires and Ghouls (oh my!)

August 26, 2012 by

First, enjoy Part 1 of our coverage of Clay Morgan’s UNDEAD: Revived, Resuscitated, Reborn.
Also, meet historian, educator Clay Morgan in our author interview.

From the Zombie Psalm to Twilight:
3 Millennia of Popular Milestones

A look at some of the many pop-culture references related to Clay Morgan’s UNDEAD.

3,000 YEARS AGO: THE ZOMBIE PSALM

Tommie Harris and what Clay Morgan calls The Zombie Psalm.Search the precise phrase “The Zombie Psalm” (in quotes) in Google today and you’ll see an amazing sight—less than 1 page of results. That’s because Clay Morgan is just now trying to coin that phrase to describe a very popular and downright haunting passage in Psalm 91. It’s the passage that declares:
You will not fear the terror of the night,
or the arrow that flies by day,
or the pestilence that stalks in darkness,
or the destruction that wastes at noonday.
A thousand may fall at your side,
ten thousand at your right hand,
but it will not come near you.
According to Clay, the Psalmist probably was envisioning the ghastly death and pestilence associated with ancient battlefields. Thousands were dead or dying; disease was running rampant and into this zombie landscape, the faithful warrior was stepping once again. In fact, this isn’t as crazy as it sounds. Psalm 91 has long been known as The Soldier’s Psalm. Wallet-sized copies have been carried into battle by countless men and women. How popular is it today? Pro football defensive standout Tommie Harris writes Psalm 91 on the adhesive breathing strip he sticks to his nose before each game. Tommie has said in interviews that the particular Psalm 91 passage Clay highlights is his own prayer on the football field.

2,600 Years Ago: EZEKIEL AND DEM DANCING BONES

Do you doubt that our current fascination with the undead stretches back to ancient roots? Just start singing along with “Dem Bones,” which retells a famous story from the prophet Ezekiel. That vision inspiring African-American slaves to trust in God’s power to overturn the cruel system that bound them. We have the poet James Weldon Johnson to thank for writing the melody and preserving that spiritual for us today.

2,000 Years Ago: UNDOING DEATH BECOMES A CHRISTIAN HALLMARK

For more on this, see Part 1 of our coverage of UNDEAD: Revivied, Resuscitated, Reborn.

Around 400 AD: CHRISTIANS CLING TO SKELETONS OF SAINTS

Reverently preserving the bones of the dead began long before Christianity. Then, after Jesus, some of the earliest Christian worship services during the era of Roman persecution were held near the graves of martyrs. Later, when Rome officially recognized Christianity, many of the faithful focused their faith on the spiritual power of relics associated with Jesus and the first Christian saints. By around the year 400, the competition for relics was growing, partly because relics drew pilgrims to major shrines and pilgrims brought money. St. Jerome felt that this was becoming enough of a problem that he had to clarify the practice: “We do not worship, we do not adore, for fear that we should bow down to the creature rather than to the creator, but we venerate the relics of the martyrs in order the better to adore Him whose martyrs they are.” There’s not a wilder tale of the competition for relics than the holy hopscotch involving John the Baptist’s head. THIS WEEK brings one of the oldest commemorations in the worldwide Christian church, involving that dramatic beheading.

IN THE YEAR 1300: DANTE TAKES A FAMOUS TOUR OF HELL

The brilliant Italian poet Dante Alighieri lived until his mid 50s before dying in 1321, but he cast himself as 35 in the year 1300 as he set off on his famous tour of hell, purgatory and heaven. He produced one of the world’s greatest literary masterpieces (and undead-fest supreme), The Divine Comedy. This lengthy epic is packed with sophisticated word play and symbolic twists and turns. The souls being tortured in hell for the sin of lust, for example, are forever pushed this way and that way by a powerful wind. Those being punished for the sin of anger find themselves endlessly fighting other lost souls—or sinking into a deep swampy pool of anger. Dante supposedly was warning readers of the dangers of temptation, and the pathway to heaven, but he also gave us all a deviously imaginative vision of foul play. Mystery writers in particular have found themselves drawn to Dante. In fact, one of Dante’s many famous translators was the British mysery writer and outspoken Christian activist Dorothy L. Sayers.

1690: NEW ENGLAND SCARES MILLIONS OF KIDS … TO SLEEP

It’s tough to pinpoint the origin of the terrifying bedtime prayer, but by 1690, it was distributed to American families in the form of The New England Primer. Remember the prayer?
Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I shall die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.
In his book, Clay Morgan says this is just a glimpse at “how terrifying” it was to live with the prospect of earlier understandings about the fate of our souls upon death. Today, he writes, he doesn’t know a parent who would make young children recite this prayer.

1818: FRANKENSTEIN’S MONSTER IS BROUGHT TO LIFE

Mary Shelley lived in a maelstrom of creative energies—surrounded by her husband, a great Romantic poet, and their friend Lord Byron—not to mention other like-minded writers, artists and activists. She created the first of the great monstrous figures of 20th-century pop culture in Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus. But she also turned out other books as well. That includes a pioneering work in what we would call today science fiction: the apocalyptic The Last Man. One can only imagine what Mary Shelley and her crowd would make of our fascination with the undead, today.

1827: A MUMMY UNWRAPPED FOR THE WORLD TO SEE

Something amazing was stirring the women in Britain in this era of Romantic arts and letters. The second of the great undead figures of 20th-century pop culture, The Mummy, debuted as an 1827 novel by the English botanist Jane C. Loudon. (That’s right, she and her husband were most famous for serious studies of plant life.) Before penning her own classic, Jane Loudon almost certainly had read Mary Shelley’s influential novels. Plus, historians say that Loudon, as a little girl, is likely to have attended a public unwrapping of a mummy in a London theater in 1821. In that era, European exploration of Egypt was yielding widespread fascination with all things having to do with the wonders of the ancient pharoahs.

1842: PULLING THE MASK OFF THE RED DEATH

The Brits didn’t have an exclusive corner on fantasies of the undead. The Romantic movement had crossed the Atlantic and one of the chief proponents of a very dark romanticism was Edgar Allen Poe. Before he died at a youthful 40, Poe had written some of the most haunting tales of death and the undead that the world has ever seen. His Mask of the Red Death debuted in Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine in 1842. The genteel publication, aimed pointedly at women as well as at male readers, is another sign of the huge popularity of undead tales with female readers.

1843: GHOSTS PERFORM A CHRISTMAS CAROL

Even Clay Morgan admits that his favorite version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol is one of the comic versions: Bill Murray in the 1988 movie Scrooged. What with musical versions and a very popular Muppet rendition, it’s easy to forget that Dickens wrote a flat-out ghost story that featured bone-chiling warnings from the undead. That’s why Dickens opens his classic Christmas story with these lines: “Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a doornail. Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a doornail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a doornail. Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did.” Get it!?! Despite all the songs and laughs that we associate with Scrooge today—this is truly a tale of the undead.

1863: LINCOLN EMBRACES THE DEAD

In our recent coverage of the noted historian of American religion, Stephen Prothero, he describes Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address as “the greatest American speech ever.” A lot of historians of religion—including Clay Morgan—refer to the speech at the Civil War battlefield as a turning point in our collective religious culture. Some scholars have argued that the leaders of the George Washington era invoked a Moses-like image of the nation’s religious destiny. At Gettysburg, Lincoln invoked the dead, sacrificial blood and summoned a Jesus-like image of our American spirit. This is such a rich chapter in our history that Clay Morgan also focuses on the spiritual lessons of Lincoln’s life.

1897: COUNT DRACULA TAKES A BOW

Before the 19th century ended, a man who was well known in London for his work as a theatrical manager gave the world the last of the great 20th-century undead monsters: Dracula. Bram Stoker spent a long time researching European folklore on vampires before writing his horrific novel. The book was not a runaway bestseller, but it receive high praise from British literary lights. The Daily Mail lauded Stoker as surpassing both Mary Shelley and Edgar Allen Poe.

1921: WWI AND THE COTTINGLEY FAIRIES

Earlier this summer, ReadTheSpirit published a two-part story about Sherlock Holmes’ creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and his embarassing declaration later in life that he had scientifically proven the reality of fairies in the English countryside. At that point in his life, Doyle was crushed by a series of deaths in his family that clustered around World War I. That horrific war also scarred other writers, including C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. In Doyle’s case, the loss of a series of relatives around WWI led to a period of deep depression. It also led Doyle to embrace spiritualism and a fond hope that either science or the Christian faith would find a way to pierce the wall between life and death.

1922: TREASURES OF KING TUT (AND A MUMMY’S CURSE?)

Almost exactly a century after little Jane Loudon is likely to have watched a public unwrapping of a mummy in London, explorer Howard Carter rocketed Egyptian mummies to front-page news around the world. (That’s Carter in the photo at right.) In late 1922, Carter and his sponsor Lord Carnarvon caused a sensation by entering the tomb of King Tutankhamun. Not only did mummies leap back into pop culture with a vengeance—but also with distinctly evil intent after rumors of an eternal curse of the pharoahs. That myth arose after Lord Carnarvon died in 1923 while still in his 50s. He died of a mosquito bite that became infected and resulted in blood poisoning—enough to fuel nightmares of mummies reaching from beyond the grave. Today, serious historians call the “mummy’s curse” nothing but hysteric claptrap, but that didn’t stop a steady flow of shocking headlines. The King Tut tomb also shaped a century of fanciful media. For example, the oldest surviving Dr. Who science-fiction series from 1960s television is The Tomb of the Cybermen. The robot-like creatures later became regular foes of The Doctor on British television, but the original multi-part series was designed by BBC producers to mirror the opening of King Tut’s tomb in the 1920s.

1931 AND 1932: BIRTH OF THE ANCIENT/MODERN MONSTERS

Most of the 20th Century’s great undead monsters stepped onto the silver screen in the era of silent film. The most chilling of the silent horrors was the 1922 version of Dracula, called Nosferatu. The eerie imagery of Max Schreck as the vampire—sometimes just Schreck’s shadow cast on a wall—hasn’t been surpassed since the creepy film was first shown in theaters. When sound began bursting from Hollywood, Bella Lugosi brought Dracula back to life in a sleek new style and Boris Karloff gave us Frankenstein’s monster complete with the bolts in his neck and an over-sized physique. One year later, in 1932, Karloff gave us his classic Imhotep, aka The Mummy.

1930’s: HAITI AND OUR FEAR OF ZOMBIES

As Clay Morgan points out in his book, our current love of zombies dates back roughly to the 1930s with the movie White Zombie. Of course, American assumptions about zombies in that era are mingled with cultural bias and racism related to the Haitian roots of what Haitian’s refer to as Vodou. Zombies are not a major part of the faith that blends elements of African and Christian cultures. In fact, from a Haitian perspective, Vodou’s proudest moment was the Bois Caiman, a 1791 Vodou invocation of the spiritual power to throw off the nation’s slave-owning powers. Within the complex spiritual tradition, zombies are regarded as a dark art in which powerful drugs are used to control a person’s will.

1968: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (AND ZOMBIES WE LOVE)

For all intents and purposes, Clay Morgan points out, our current obsession with zombies was born in 1968 in the gritty, black-and-white, low-budget horror film, Night of the Living Dead. Clay writes: “Tragedies struck in quick succession in 1968—the Vietnam War had already divided the country before January of that year when the Tet Offensive showed anxious citizens that the end of the conflict was not coming soon. Then both Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert Kennedy were assassinated within one moth of each other. Racial divisions and protests drove national conflict as many found ways to escape the madness of it all. By that point, flesh-eating zombies fit in quite well with the absurdity of life that millions of people found so hard to understand.”

1972: A KINDER, GENTLER DRACULA—COUNT VON COUNT

Clay Morgan actually begins his book with his own childhood memories of Count von Count, who first appeared on Sesame Street in 1972. After all the other ghastly associations with zombies, vampires, ghouls and other forms of the undead, a warm and fuzzy version of Dracula ushered in a whole new era of vampire love.
REMEMBERING THE ORIGINAL COUNT: Millions, like Clay Morgan, immediately recognize the Count’s look—but they also know his voice and distinctive laugh. The original voice of the Count, Jerry Nelson, recently died. CNN online has a tribute to Nelson that includes several memorable Count video clips.

2002: VAMPIRES ON VACATION
30 DAYS OF NIGHT

Flash forward 30 years from Count von Count and there is absolutely nothing warm and fuzzy about the sharp-toothed, blood-dripping vampires in the comicbook epic by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith. 30 Days of Night refers to the odd geographic phenomenon of long-term darkness in Barrow, Alaska—a natural allure for light-sensitive vampires. Clay Morgan is a fan of comics and graphic novels and calls this comic tale “a blood-sucking Mardi Gras.” And, no, he’s not talking about a family-friendly Mardi Gras. Clearly, Americans may want to fall in love with the undead sometimes, but we also want to scare ourselves silly along the way.

2005: GIRLS, MEET SOME VAMPIRES YOU’LL JUST LOVE!

By 2005, the stage was set for chills and thrills—horrors and hugs from the undead realm. Originally published as children’s literature (Breaking Dawn won the British Book Award in 2008 for Children’s Book of the Year), Twilight now has crossed over from girls to adult women. Stephenie Meier has sold more than 100 million copies—and the Twilight odometer keeps spinning.

2005: HAD ENOUGH FOOTBALL? TRY HUMANS VS. ZOMBIES

That autumn, HvZ debuts at tiny Goucher College near Baltimore. Now supported by a non-profit website, Humans vs. Zombies is turning into a worldwide phenomenon.

2010: THE WALKING DEAD STUMBLES INTO NETWORK TV

The AMC network, crowing about its rave reviews for Mad Men and Breaking Bad, jumped into the realm of the zombies in 2010. The third season of The Walking Dead starts in autumn 2012. Clay Morgan says our current zombie fad is strong evidence of widespread anxiety in American culture. He writes: “Tragedy and zombie popularity are inversely proportional. The worse things get, the more we buy into the apocalypse. The 1980s and 1990s weren’t perfect, but they were relatively peaceful and prosperous. Not surprisng then that you won’t find massive mainstream appeal to zombies like we see in a post 9/11 world.”

2011: UNDEAD, YET OH SO CARING—THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE

By last year, American culture was overloaded with zombies. The 2006 novel, World War Z, has given way to a big-budget movie version starring Brad Pitt, due to hit theaters in summer 2013. Even the federal government is getting involved through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta. Starting in 2011, the CDC began producing some of its most popular guides to public health using tongue-in-cheek zombie themes. Most famous is Preparedness 101: Zombie Apocalypse by the CDC, posted online in 2011. Now, in 2012, the CDC is back with a graphic novel called Preparedness 101: Zombie Pandemic (cover at right). We think the staff at the CDC should be praised for the creativity. In this era of dire budget cutting, the CDC is finding a way to put the undead to work for the public good!

2012: TWILIGHT’S LAST GLEAMING (MAYBE)—BREAKING DAWN, 2

Apparently, the Twilight film series will end with the debut on November 16 of Breaking Dawn Part 2—although some online rumors suggest that more films with the Twilight characters might follow. You may think that we have strayed far from Christian connections, but that’s not true. Enjoy our coverage of Jane Wells’ Glitter in the Sun, a Twilight Bible study book.

Got a question or an update that we shouldn’t miss in our chronology?
Email us at [email protected] with your thoughts.

And, enjoy Part 1 of our coverage of Clay Morgan’s UNDEAD: Revived, Resuscitated, Reborn.

Meet Clay Morgan in our author interview.

Please help us to reach a wider audience

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Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion and cultural diversity.

Awakening Hope: Wilson-Hartgrove on St. Benedict

July 25, 2012 by

THIS WEEK, we’re welcoming Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, a chief architect in a nationwide renewal movement focused on neighborhood congregations.
PART 1: Find out about Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove’s different approach to building healthy congregations and healthy neighborhoods.
PART 2: Today, read the beginning of our interview with Jonathan, focusing on his new edition of the Christian classic, The Rule of St. Benedict.
PART 3: The portion of our interview on The Wisdom of Stability: Rooting Faith in a Mobile Culture.
PART 4: Conclusion of our interview focusing on The Awakening of Hope.

HIGHLIGHTS OF
OUR INTERVIEW
WITH JONATHAN
WILSON-HARTGROVE

DAVID: Let’s start by telling readers how to find you online.

JONATHAN: I usually direct people to my author site, which is my name dot com. There’s also the New Monasticism website.

DAVID: I want to call our readers’ attention to one small section within that New Monasticism website. It’s the section about visiting with one of the small communities within your network. As we publish this interview, more than 30 openings are listed on the Weekend Visits page either in the Durham or in the Philadelphia areas.

JONATHAN: That’s right. Nearly a dozen communities participate in the visiting program, but—at any given time—there are just a few upcoming dates listed. Throughout an entire year, we plan for about eight or ten different communities across the country to host visitors and participate in the community for a few days. We get about 150 folks visiting with us each year.

DAVID: You, your colleagues and many of your networked communities regularly communicate through Internet sites and email newsletters. I’m curious about the Wikipedia page for New Monasticism, however. People who aren’t already in connection with you may wind up going to Wikipedia to find out information about your movement. How accurate is that page?

JONATHAN: I don’t have anything to do with editlng that Wikipedia page, but I think it seems to sketch out pretty well some of the conversation that has unfolded about the new monasticism. The list they have in the Wikipedia article about our 12 Marks of New Monasticism was a statement we signed some years ago, when we invited people from about 30 communities to come and talk with us about what is happening.

DAVID: How do you describe yourself religiously today? Your name is well known to readers of books by Paraclete Press, a publishing house that specializes in Catholic-themed books. Your newest book is published by Zondervan, a major evangelical publishing house.

JONATHAN: I do laugh over some of the ways I am introduced these days. I was going to talk to a group of Lutherans last year and the woman who was going to introduce me asked: “Should I describe you as a liberal Baptist?” I scratched my head at that and said, “Uhhhh, maybe call me a Martin Luther King Baptist.”

The truth is that religous labels don’t tell us much anymore. In answer to your question, I am a Baptist and have been all my life. I’m a lay person, even though I do serve in my local congregation in pastoral ways. But I am not ordained and I am intentionally a lay person. I’ve learned a lot from Benedictines and other Catholics and I have great respect for folks in many places from many different religious traditions.

DAVID: And the name of your own home community?

JONATHAN: The name of the community where I live is Rutba House. We are 14 people who are living in the household as members of the community and then we have an extended family around us of people who eat with us, pray with us, work on neighborhood activities with us and that’s about 100 folks in all. Right now, we are living in two houses and doing work and ministry out of four houses in our neighborhood. We’re in the Walltown neighborhood of Durham, North Carolina, which I always say was a historically segregated Southern town. Historically, it was a black neighborhood; today, it’s got a significant Latino population. When we organized Rutba House, we didn’t want to start a new church. We want to support existing local churches. So, I’m active at St. John’s Missionary Baptist Church—for 100 years, it’s been an anchor in the Walltown neighborhood.

WHY ST. BENEDICT IS RELEVANT TO CONGREGATIONS TODAY

DAVID: The first of three books that we will talk about in this interview is your easier-to-read paraphrase of The Rule of Benedict, a book that has helped organize religious communities for 1,500 years. There are several reasons that this book is a radical departure from contemporary culture. One major reason is: St. Benedict believed that faith isn’t complete if we live our lives in isolation. The full expression of Christianity requires other people. That may sound like a simple idea—but it runs 180 degrees opposite from our current obsession with go-it-alone spirituality. Harvard’s Robert Putnam and others call it The Church of One. That idea was rejected by Benedict, right?

JONATHAN: I feel Benedict truly is a prophet for our time. He lived in a period when the Roman Empire was fading and no one knew what was coming next. That era was very much like this global transition we’re a part of now. Benedict’s wisdom was a great gift in that time and I think he still is today. His message is incredibly hopeful. He points to scripture and shows us that there is a way of life that we can begin living now—and that will prepare us for the world to come. Benedict saw both the desert tradition of early Christianity and he saw the monastic communities that were emerging. Practical living today—adapted from the ideas Benedict showed us—can help our communities to become a kind of school for what we will need in the world to come.

DAVID: In your introduction to the book, you make it clear: This is not a self-help book. This is a book about coming together as Christians to form communities. At one point, you write that this book “cannot be read honestly as a guide for my ‘personal spiritual journey.’ To listen to it at all is to consider how it is telling me to pray and eat with other people.” That’s radical stuff in our Me-obsessed culture, right?

JONATHAN: What we’re experiencing today in our culture is the ultimate expression of American individualism and the Protestant impulse to divide over theological disagreement. For so long, we’ve taught ourselves that we’re supposed to go it alone. Don’t like something? Well, we should all go establish a church for ourselves. Ultimately, following this line of thinking does leave us alone in our own spiritual journey. Benedict was teaching that we can’t establish a church alone.

Now that we are coming to terms with global climate change and the new global economy that’s emerging, we need to realize that we’re at the end of this dream that our lives can be fulfilled by simply trying to become all you want on your own. We’re at a point in history when we need to conceptualize a common good. That’s why Benedict’s wisdom is so relevant. He allows us to do the very personal work of dying and being born again, which is essential to become a real member of a local community—and more broadly a member of the larger community.

That’s precisely why his message is so important: He says that we do need the larger religious community. Yes, community often is troubling and annoying and we face all kinds of challenges and problems in community—yet community is the heart of the experience of faith.

Benedict points us to a 1,500-year tradition of stability and community.

DAVID: That’s a great place in this interview to switch over and talk about a second recent book you’ve published.

READ more of our interview with Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, next focusing on his book The Wisdom of Stability.

Please help us to reach a wider audience

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Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion and cultural diversity.

ONE & Oprah converge! (We’ve got free movie extras)

June 3, 2012 by

Sit back! Grab a cup of coffee.
If you don’t have time now, then bookmark this page for a moment of pleasure and inspiration later in your day. (And please tell a friend? Perhaps click the Facebook button below?)

THE NEWS TODAY: Finally, ONE and Oprah are converging. Over the years, Oprah individually welcomed many of the religious sages who appear in this feature-length documentary film about the world’s diverse spiritual pathways. Now, Oprah has announced that she will broadcast ONE to the world on her OWN channel this year. Later this week, we welcome filmmaker Ward Powers to share the startling story of ONE’s creation and expansion as a message of peace.
Even before ReadTheSpirit was founded in 2007, Editor David Crumm was reporting nationally on this remarkable independent film production, which was created by first-time filmmakers and now has circled the globe in festivals and theaters.

TODAY’S FREE MOVIE EXTRAS: We’re giving you an All Access Pass, today, to dozens of inspiring extras from ONE that you won’t see on Oprah.
So, grab a cup of tea to sip. And, if you don’t have a moment now, then save this page for later!

ONE THE MOVIE TRAILER: GET THE BASIC IDEA

Let’s start with the basic Movie Trailer, so you’ll have an idea of this project’s origins and scope. Click on the video screen below to watch this short clip. (NOTE: If you don’t see a video screen in your version of this story, click here to reload the story in your browser.)

ONE THE MOVIE, AN EXTRA: SUFI MASTER LLEWELLYN VAUGHAN-LEE

On June 1, ReadTheSpirit featured our first in-depth interview with Sufi master Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, a major voice for peace and religious unity in the world. Llewellyn also appears in the ONE movie, but of course the original Powers interviews with him were far longer than the final length of ONE could hold. So, Ward Powers is releasing additional clips, this summer, including this one on the problem of suffering.

ONE THE MOVIE, AN EXTRA: CATHOLIC FATHER THOMAS KEATING

We also have featured Father Thomas Keating in the pages of ReadTheSpirit. Now, a world-famous spiritual figure for his innovative teaching on contemplative prayer, Keating is rare among spiritual sages for his depth of learning in science as well as religion. In this 4-minute clip about the natue of suffering in the world, Keating ranges widely from theology to contemporary science.

ONE THE MOVIE, AN EXTRA: FATHER RICHARD ROHR ON LOVE

We also have welcomed Father Richard Rohr to ReadTheSpirit, recommending his ongoing work on a variety of spiritual themes. Here, Rohr talks about the nature of “true love” and provides a definition that you may find very helpful to share with friends, yourself.

ONE THE MOVIE: DOZENS MORE EXTRAS

In preparation for the upcoming Oprah broadcast of ONE, Ward Powers has uploaded dozens of movie extras into a special new channel on YouTube. Use this link to the ONE Channel in YouTube to find links to a long list of these “extras” clips. The clips draw on spiritual wisdom far and wide, including Buddhist scholar and teacher Robert Thurman (yes, he’s Uma Thurman’s father), the Hindu-influenced writer Ram Dass, the Vietnamese-Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh—and many more.

You also can visit the ONE Project website, the home base for news about the movie, plus links to other showings, video clips and much more. There’s news on the ONE site, as well, about getting a copy of the movie for home viewing.

Please help us to reach a wider audience

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Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion and cultural diversity.

Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee: A Sufi master invites us to pray

May 28, 2012 by

CLICK THE COVER to visit the book’s Amazon page.This week, ReadTheSpirit welcomes Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, a British-American Sufi mystic and teacher who is known to many Americans through his books, lectures and appearances in documentaries about interfaith unity. For most Americans, understanding Vaughan-Lee’s work is challenging. After all, the majority of us call ourselves Christian­—between 7 and 8 out of 10 Americans according to Gallup. Yet, more than half of Americans can’t name the four Gospels when pollsters ask. In America, George Gallup famously said, religion is “miles wide and inches deep.”

So, this week, we are introducing Vaughan-Lee to our readers in the U.S. and around the world—and we are drawing connections between his teaching and those of other religious voices we have featured in our pages. Come back later this week for our interview with Vaughan-Lee about his efforts to promote peace between the world’s religious traditions.

We asked readers what they know about Sufis, and many responded: “Wasn’t Rumi a Sufi?”
The answer is: Yes, and we have published stories about that famous poet, like this one featuring Rumi translator Coleman Barks.

Others asked: “Are Sufis the people who dance and whirl?” The answer: Yes, some Sufi traditions encourage dance and ecstatic whirling. But, Vaughan-Lee represents a “silent” branch of Sufism that practices quiet contemplative prayer perhaps closer to Catholic Father Thomas Keating than to Whirling Dervishes .

Today, we are recommending Vaughan-Lee’s new book, Prayer of the Heart in Christian and Sufi Mysticism. In less than 80 pages, he packs a concise and sturdy guide to global approaches to prayer that welcome everyone to pray—whatever your religious tradition may be. His teachings remind us of the work of Keating and Celtic Christian mystic John Philip Newell as well.

LLEWELLYN VAUGHN-LEE’S QUEST TO HEAL THE EARTH

A good example of Vaughan-Lee’s convergence with Newell is the chapter called Prayer for the Earth.
A brief excerpt from Vaughan-Lee …

Photo via Wikimedia Commons.In whatever way we are drawn to pray, there is a vital need to include the earth in our prayers. We are living in a time of ecological devastation, the catastrophic effect of our materialistic culture on the ecosystem. Our rivers are toxic, the rainforests slashed and burned, vast tracts of land made a wasteland due to our insatiable desires for oil, gas and minerals. We have raped and pillaged and polluted the earth, pushing it into the dangerous state of imbalance we call climate change. Creation itself is now calling to us, sending us signs of its imbalance, and the soul of the world, the anima mundi, which the ancients understood as the spiritual presence of the earth is crying out. … Those whose hearts are open may hear it too, the cry of the world soul, of the spiritual being of our mother the earth. …

We are the children and the inheritors of a culture that has banished God to heaven. Early Christianity persecuted and ultimately largely extinguished any earth-based spirituality, and the physical world became a place of darkness and sin. Then after the Age of Enlightenment, the prevailing world view that grew out of Newtonian physics framed the world as an inanimate mechanism we could easily master, indeed were meant to master; we simply needed to discover its laws to tame it to our own ends. As a legacy of that view we have developed a materialistic culture that treats the earth as a commodity that exists to serve our own selfish purpose. Our greed now walks with heavy boots across the world, with complete disregard for the sacred nature of creation. …

Our Western culture no longer knows how to relate to the world as a sacred being. Now the world needs our prayers more than we know. It needs us to acknowledge its sacred nature, to understand that it is not just something to use and dispose of. It needs us to help I to reconnect with its own sacred source, the life-giving waters of creation that can save it from destruction. It needs us to remember it to the Creator. We are needed now to reclaim our sacred duty as guardian, or vice-regent, of the natural world. …

There are many ways to pray for the earth. First it is essential to acknowledge that the earth is not “unfeeling matter” but a living being that has given us life. It can be helpful to ask ourselves: How would we like to be treated? Just as a physical object to e used and repeatedly abused? Then perhaps we can sense the earth’s suffering: the physical suffering we see in the dying species and polluted waters, the deeper suffering of our collective disregard for its sacred nature. Perhaps, if we open our hearts and souls to the being we call the world, we will be able to hear the cry of the anima mundi, of its soul. For centuries it was understood that the world was a living being with a soul, and that we were a part of this being, the light of our own soul a spark, a scintilla, of the light of the world soul. As a culture we have forgotten hat, but this understanding is foundation of the prayer that is needed now. Through it we make that connection conscious again; we help bring our light back to the world soul.

JOHN PHILIP NEWELL FROM CHRIST OF THE CELTS

What’s the connection with Celtic Christian writer John Philip Newell?
Read our earlier interview with Newell, or consider re-reading his book Christ of the Celts. Here are a few lines from Christ of the Celts that echo Vaughan-Lee’s writing, but approach the same theme from Newell’s Celtic-Christian perspective. From Christ of the Celts …

I heard within me what the ancients call “the music of the spheres.” The Celts were familiar with this music. In the Hebrides of Scotland, it was common practice well into the 19th century for men to take off their caps to greet the morning sun and for women to bend their knee in reverence to the moon at night. These were the lights of God. They moved in an ancient harmony that spoke to the relationship of all things. And they witnessed also to the eternal rhythm between masculine energies and feminine energies that commingle deep in the body of the universe. …

Not only is creation viewed as good, as coming out of the goodness of God, but it is viewed as well as theophany or a disclosing of the heart of God’s being. Eriugena, the 9th century Irish teacher, says that if goodness were extracted from the universe, all things would cease to exist. For goodness is not simply a feature of life; it is the very essence of life. Goodness gives rise to being just as evil leads to nonbeing or to a destruction and denial of life’s sacredness. The extent to which we become evil or false is the extent to which we no longer truly exist. Eriugena and the Celtic teachers invite us to look to the deepest energies of our bodies and souls and to the deepest patterns and rhythms of the earth as theophanies of the goodness of God. And they invite us to see Christ as the One who speaks again this forgotten goodness, the Word that comes to us from the Beginning. He is the memory of the first and deepest sound within creation. It is an invitation to listen for the sacred not away from life, but deep within all that has life.

Read More: Enjoy our interview with Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee.

Please help us to reach a wider audience

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Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion and cultural diversity.

Twilight subs for religion & spirituality for some teens

May 27, 2012 by

This Twilight news is buzzing around the world: A Danish researcher finds some teens in that non-religious corner of the world are experiencing the intense vampires-and-romance series much like other people experience religion. Here’s a Mother Nature News verison of the story, which says in part: “American fans, or Twihards, as they’ve been dubbed, respond to the movie in similar ways.” But, “The semireligious aspect of fandom might be slightly different in America, where religious faith is more common.”

Dr. Wayne Baker, the sociologist who writes the OurValues column, just published a five-part series about Americans’ distinctively strong faith. In response to the Danish report, Baker says such findings could echo his own research into the vast differences in cultural experiences of religion. While American culture is overflowing with faith, Denmark is largely secularized.

Baker cites these comparisons between levels of faith in the two nations:
Ranked on “Certain belief in God”: Out of 30 countries, the U.S. ranks 5, Denmark is 26.
On “Don’t believe in God”: Out of 30 countries, the U.S. ranks 27, Denmark is 8.

At ReadTheSpirit, we turned to author and Twilight expert Jane Wells for more …

Twilight as a Touchstone of Faith:
‘Wicked Angels, Adorable Vampires’

By JANE WELLS

I’ve been saying it for two years, but now there is independent scholarly research showing that Twilight and other Gothic-themed media have a value in religious discourse.

Danish researcher Line Nybro Peterson drew this conclusion in “Wicked Angels, Adorable Vampires!” That is the title of her doctoral thesis in the film and media studies department at Københavns Universitet (the University of Copenhagen in English). Peterson found that teens in the largely secular nation on Denmark use media, usually of American origin, to explore universal questions of good, evil, life, death and love.

“My thesis demonstrates that a film series like Twilight offers young people a playground for exploring life’s big questions, moral judgment and to imagine the possibility of the supernatural in a pleasurable and informal fashion. The fictional worlds challenge their presuppositions about themselves and their surroundings,” Peterson told the University of Copenhagen News this month.

Peterson’s thesis consists of a qualitative study of the consumption of TV shows with supernatural and religious content among seventy-two 14- to 18-year-old Danish teenagers, a smaller study among a group of nine teenage Twilight fans as well as a more general analysis of American TV shows’ representations of religious themes and issues.

Click on the book cover to learn more about Jane Wells’ book on Christian connections with Twilight.Well … hunh!
Who knew this suburban Detroit hausfrau had her thumb so firmly on the zeitgeist? And why hasn’t Glitter in the Sun: A Bible Study Searching for Truth in the Twilight Saga sold a million copies yet?

Peterson and I aren’t the only ones to see spirituality of a positive sort in current gothic literature, movies and television shows.

Author Victoria Nelson in her new Harvard Press book, Gothicka: Vampire Heroes, Human Gods, and the New Supernatural, asserts a new religion is being formed through this new breed of optimistic horror story. She cites a range of books and novels in which what was formally the worst fate possible—becoming a vampire, zombie or werewolf—is the best possible end and the victim becomes “perfected.” The obvious example is the Twilight Saga in which human Bella Swan becomes perfect and indestructible as a vampire. (Another recent novel is Dust, by Joan Frances Turner, in which the zombies, thanks to a mysterious virus, cease to rot away, and instead heal into a body that seems to be able to live forever.)

According to a May 23 Wall Street Journal review of Nelson’s book, she suggests “that the Gothic has, in the 21st century, taken a ‘surprising new turn toward the light,’ not only ‘showing signs of outgrowing the dark supernaturalism it inherited from its 18th-century ancestor,’ but doing so in a way that promises to shift it from being the locus of a displaced spiritual sense to the possible harbinger of an actual new faith system. ‘Is a major new religion born of these fictions looming on the horizon?’ Ms. Nelson asks boldly.”

My answer to that question is: No, I don’t think so. I do, however, believe this trend hearkens back to the Enlightenment, when Gothic literature first rose on the scene, as our souls began to hunger for the mystical being driven out of our lives by logic and science. By now, the spiritual deficits in our culture have reached critical mass and teenagers especially are looking for anything that has eternal meaning.

Please help us to reach a wider audience

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Originally published at readthespirit.com, an online magazine covering religion and cultural diversity.