Is it moral to drink coffee? Is Harry Potter safe for children? Shouldn’t the lyrics of our worship songs be better? Why are zombies so popular? Liberal or conservative?
I know the focus of successful blogs is very focused. I could possibly develop a large and faithful following if I’d write about one thing like movie reviews or daily devotions.
The problem is I’m interested in more than one thing, so I sacrifice readers for variety.
I read history, philosophy, theology, and literature. I love watching and thinking about movies and television. So I write about all this from a Christian perspective. Because, more than anything, I am a follower of Jesus Christ.
Hey Trent,
I’m a graduate student from Switzerland and I am writing a paper entitled (for now) “Man Is a Zombie to Man: Deconstruction of Human Modern Identity in Boyle’s ’28 Days Later'”. Your articles on the issue are pretty much what I was going for, they’re very interesting and you are a precious source of information and inspiration! However, I can’t seem to find your bibliography, could you help me with that? Anyway, thank you for your articles!
Regards,
Frank
Hi Frank, I love your paper’s thesis. I do have a bibliography. How about if I post it to my zombie website: cureforzombies.com Much of what you read here, is posted there with some revision. If you’d like to post some of the ideas from your paper in a more public forum, let me know. Or send me your paper and I’ll write it up (giving you credit for the researc, of course) Thanks for reading.
Trent
I responded to your comment on http://mythicscribes.com/analysis/the-walking-dead-is-not-about-zombies/ but thought I’d put it here to make sure you saw it. Not sure if this is the best place, but it is the only place I could find at which I was able to post. I’ll look forward to any thoughts you might have!
Good points about the living being the bigger threat to humanity than the zombies in The Walking Dead.
You ask whether humanity “is” monstrous. Don’t forget that human consciousness, along with ethics, morals, etc can change over time. If the zombie apocalypse makes humanity more monstrous, it could also make humanity less monstrous and more compassionate.
We might think of the level of human consciousness as the average of the consciousness of all the people in the group (or it could be some other way to gauge where “humanity” as a group is at in any given moment in time). And within that group there are individuals who are each at different levels of consciousness/spiritual awareness/ethics/morals.
The Walking Dead does a pretty good job of telling a story that puts these philosophical/spiritual/ethical questions right in the forefront.
To me, the interesting question is whether the crisis of survival that the human individuals and small groups of humans as well as humanity as a whole is experiencing, will that crisis lead humans to “devolve” into violence and selfishness in order to survive or will humans learn to work together to increase each individuals chances for survival?
Or put another way, why does a survival crisis lead some individual humans to become more violent and selfish, distrustful and fearful for their own survival and why does it make other people want to band together to cooperate in trust? Will humanity as a whole devolve negatively or evolve positively?
And of course, this same question presents itself to humanity as we know it in this day and age with all the crises of survival that humanity actually faces, so the story might help us learn about ourselves, increase our awareness of our own choices and allow us the chance to make better choices for the survival of our species, other species we share the world with and the world itself.