How can video games challenge us to think more deeply about our reality, faith, and community?Since the advent of video games in the 1960s, they have become the common experience of everyone from Gen-X to the Millennial and post-Millennial generations. While many of today’s clergy, parishioners, and theologians grew up gaming, the church’s stance regarding video games is one of, at best, bemusement.This book takes seriously the idea that video games can cha...

Batman is one of the most recognized and popular pop culture icons. Appearing on the page of Detective Comics #27 in 1939, the character has inspired numerous characters, franchises, and spin-offs over his 80+ year history. The character has displayed versatility, appearing in stories from multiple genres, including science fiction, noir, and fantasy and mediums far beyond his comic book origins. While there are volumes analyzing Batman through literary, philosophical, and psychological le...

Christianity was born in the midst of great expectation and fear about the world’s future. The existing Jewish paradigm of the coming Messiah, his antithesis, and the initiation of the coming age set the stage for Christian beliefs about the end of the current age. However, the unexpected death and resurrection of Jesus caused that paradigm to be reformed within the burgeoning Christian faith, reshaping hopes, and reworking old patterns.Dread and Hope explores the ways in which thos...

Scholars of religion have begun to explore horror and the monstrous, not only within the confines of the biblical text or the traditions of religion, but also as they proliferate into popular culture. This exploration emerges from what has long been present in horror: an engagement with the same questions that animate religious thought – questions about the nature of the divine, humanity's place in the universe, the distribution of justice, and what it means to live a good life, among many...