Gene Luen Yang’s The Rosary is not only a comic book, it is an actual rosary. The comic book is transformed not only into a vehicle for prayer, the comic book IS the prayer. Each panel becomes a meditation on the various chapters of the life of Jesus, and the prayers that have to be said in each panel become a way to ritually familiarize oneself with his life and deeds.
Read more "Gene Luen Yang, the Rosary, and Comic Books as Prayer"Some people may think that I am exaggerating, that this dystopian America is not what Trump, Pence, and their followers want. But as a thought experiment, if you take Pence’s ideas, which have been quite consistent throughout his time as a member of Congress and then as the Governor of Indiana, what kind of America do we see? What does an America in which women do not have the same rights as men (there is a very interesting New Yorker piece on his views on this issue), where abortion is illegal, where gay people have no rights (in 2006 he said that “societal collapse was always brought about following an advent of the deterioration of marriage and family.”), and race issues in America are not really a problem? The Handmaid’s Tale explores an America in which all of those ideals become a reality.
Read more "Under His Eye: Handmaid’s Tale, Evangelical Christianity, and Mike Pence’s America"Note: In this post I look at NBC The Good Place Season 1 (available on the NBC website as well as on Netflix). There are some spoilers towards the end. The question of what happens to us after we die is as old as humanity itself. From the oldest known temple structure, Göbekli Tepe, a burial […]
Read more "The Good Place: When Heaven Feels Like Hell"Last weekend, Darren Aranofsky released his latest film Mother! to abysmal box office results and quite strong negative reactions by audiences. Critics, overall, seemed to have liked it, but the public in general was mostly confounded, if not downright outraged by what they had watched. CinemaScore, a site that surveys audiences reviews of films gave […]
Read more "In Defense of Mother!"Last night, like many other people across the country, I went to see It, only to find out at the box-office that the last showing of the day was sold-out. I decided, instead, to watch Mother! the latest film by Darren Aranofsky, which has been called confusing, pretentious, and even “the worst movie of the […]
Read more "Mother! and the Dangers of Biblical Allegory"Note: After a little summer break, the Lost Among the Walking blog is back. I was going to post this last week but, as many Floridians, I left my home with my family for a few days to scape the worst of Hurricane Irma. This post deals with Game of Thrones, prophecies, and the notion of […]
Read more "Predicting the Future In Game of Thrones: Azor Ahai, Cognitive Dissonance, and how Prophecies Really Work"Are you a Muslim if you eat bacon? What about if you drink alcohol? Do you need to pray five times a day? Can you pick and choose in order to create your own identity as a Muslim? And what does it even mean to be a Muslim (or a Christian, or a Hindu)? How […]
Read more "Eating Bacon and Being a Muslim in Aziz Ansari’s Master of None"