That Dragon, Cancer: Video Games, Death, and My Problem with Heaven

Recently I played a video game called That Dragon, Cancer. Well, I didn't so much as play it as move the mouse around periodically and infrequently click the mouse when appropriate. The rest of the time was spent futilely trying to hold back tears.

Graphic Doubt: The Disruption of Faith in Comic Books and Graphic Literature

On April 17th, 2015, I attended the Upper Midwest Regional Conference of the American Academy of Religion.  During this event, I presented the following paper about faith and doubt in comic books.  Essentially, I sat in a room with respectable religious scholars and professors and talked about comic books for twenty minutes or so.

And of course they selected me to go first.  Which wasn't intimidating at all for someone who was pretty much the least educated person in the room.

Anyway, if you've followed Wednesday Theology for the past year or so you will recognize a lot of these themes.  Doubt has, in a way, become my main message, my strongest expression of my faith, and comic books have facilitated that expression and exploration.  So, I hope you enjoy the following.  I hope you appreciate the proper citations.

But why do this?  Why go to the trouble to write such a thing and present it to only a select few?  Well, this is pretty much an example of the culmination of everything Wednesday Theology strives to be: a legitimation, scholarly or otherwise, of the exploration of the intersection of theology and comic books.

Plus, it also gives me a sense of purpose to my life.

Daring to Address God: Confronting the Negligent Deity in Graphic Literature

The following is a paper originally presented on November 2, 2012 at Dordt College for The Christian Evasion of Popular Culture Conference.

This is what I sometimes do.  For fun.

Wednesday Theology Condensed: Language and Characteristics of the Format

"Part of the problem stems from the fact that language is not static. Language changes, grows, fluctuates, and evolves. Elizabeth Johnson says that 'words about God are cultural creatures.' God may not change, but our ways of speaking of God surely do. Particularly, as Christianity spread through the world its language adapted from Greek to Latin and onward to other languages. Few people, when they proclaim the name of Jesus, take the time to reflect on how nobody used that particular pronunciation of his name to refer to Jesus during the New Testament period. 'As cultures shift, so too does the specificity of God-talk,' says Johnson."

What does all this mean? If we are going to use graphic literature to talk about God, we need to know how the language of graphic literature works.

Trivial, Simplified Matter

Art Spiegelman: What happened in Maus was the absolute shock of an oxymoron: the Holocaust is absolutely the plast lace one would look for something to be made in the form of comics, which one associates with essentially trivial, simplified matter.
Boy: Hey! You got your comics in my Holocaust!
Girl: You got your Holocaust into my comics!

Comic Book Comics #6

by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey

Intellectually Subnormal People

Alan Moore: I think there were a surprising number of people out there who secretly longed to keep up with the adventures of Green Lantern but who felt they would have been socially ostracized if they had been seen reading a comic book in a public place.
With the advent of books like Watchmen, I think these people were given license by the term graphic novel. Everybody knew that comics were for children and for intellectually subnormal people, whereas graphic novel sounds like a much more sophisticated proposition.

Comic Book Comics #5

by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey