Comic Belief

If you answer "May the Fourth Be With You!" with "And also with you!" then Comic Belief might be for you!

This year we're celebrating this Fandom Feast by asking whether Luke Skywalker isn't, just a little bit, a Doubting Thomas. Come romp with us through the Original Trilogy, and let's kick around why it's so important to have skeptic heroes, and how profound it is when they finally do take a leap of faith. We talk about hope and doubt, sacramental speaking, and what orthodoxy can mean at its best and worst. Wars may not make one great, but right relationship with things bigger than ourselves sure does. May the Fourth be with You!

Hey! Were you worried we were stuck in cryosleep for fifty-seven years?!

We're not saying we weren't ... but we gave Mother instructions to alert us if we approached 426. You know -- Alien day? And we woke ourselves up to make sure we got an episode out to honor it!

We decide to pick up the thread from one of our earlier episodes by talking about how Alien takes the familiar experience of being in a workplace and turns it both into a space full of horror and an opportunity to band together. We talk about what it's like to be controlled by our job and what freedom means in the face of that. And we give some teaser hints about what's coming next from Comic Belief.

Stay tuned, Believers!

Need an Audiobook treat? We recommend Project Hail Mary. It's way up the Comic Belief alley, and it was an award-winning favorite of 2021 for Audible.com listeners.

The book has some mystery elements, so this episode has several spoiler tags -- you can hear our pitch for why you should read books by author Andy Weir, then you can hear the basic premise, and finally if you proceed past the spoiler warnings, we'll talk about why this is some great Comic Belief content to review! (Though Megan points out several times that even knowing some of the plot and twists, she thoroughly enjoyed the book. And we make sure not to spoil the big ending!).Suffice to say, if you like playing in the sandbox of slightly-more-sciencey sci-fi, and like characters who can inspire, this is a book well worth reading. And you can, of course, hear about it on a podcast well worth listening to, here at Comic Belief!

After a winter break basically as long as the stewardship of Gondor, we're back to talk Lord of the Rings with guest host (the Right Reverend) Craig Loya! Craig explains what it means to live a "nerd-adjacent" life (if we can even call that living?) and dive into the Lord of the Rings for the first time, books and movies alike. Led by his innocence, we take our own journey there and back again and talk about how the Lord of the Rings story models faith, friendship, and history's call to stand against evil.As a bonus: is your cellphone playing Lord of the Ringtones with your soul? All that and more on the first Comic Belief episode of 2022!

Have you been wandering a cold land hearing whispers that a figure of great dignity was about to arrive and bring great joy and hope into your seemingly endless winter?

Why, I'm sure it's our guest, the Reverend Heidi Haverkamp!

A few years ago, Heidi wrote an Advent devotional drawing on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, wanting people to have a chance to use its land of imagination and rich imagery to stir our hearts and minds as we draw near Christmas. Please join us in welcoming her as we talk over how CS Lewis's gifts continue to help young -- and perhaps even more, old -- Christians find our way home to a loving God who is both warm and wonderful and also a bit terrifying.

We talk about taking sin seriously and taking joy and grace more seriously, and take a few of our own turns wandering in just past the back of the wardrobe. See you there!

Heidi's books can be found at the links below!

-Advent in Narnia: Reflections for the Season (Westminster John Knox, 2015)-Holy Solitude: Lenten Reflections with Saints, Hermits, Prophets, and Rebels (Westminster John Knox: 2017)

-Now available! Everyday Connections: Reflections and Practices for Year C (Westminster John Knox: 2021)

- Year A and Year B to follow in Fall 2022 and Fall 2023! 

www.heidihaverkamp.net

Dune. Arrakis. Desert planet. Frank Herbert‘s 1965 novel has had a really weird journey to the silver screen, but Denis Villeneuve‘s 2021 remake is an incredibly polished update to the cult classic story.

We re-read the book and re-watched the David Lynch version to go over some of the big themes and questions. We tried fairly hard to keep spoilers limited until the very end of the episode, so you should be (mostly) safe to listen if you‘ve only seen Dune Part 1 and don‘t want to see any big reveals coming from the upcoming continuation.

That said, what do we make of Herbert‘s weirdly dense future humanity, with a struggle set on a denuded planet over the fuel of starships and metaphysical awareness alike? What is good and what is evil in a world covered with a morality as beige as its topsoil? And will Ben and Megan make it through a whole episode without accidentally saying ”George Herbert” instead of ”Frank Herbert?”

All this and more on this week‘s Comic Belief!

We really lean into our Books-and-Media season theme this time:John Scalzi's Redshirts is an award-winning novel about what might happen if the "redshirts" on Star Trek ever noticed how often they die in terrible, meaningless ways. Or how the science they do on the show makes no sense. Or how anytime someone's life gets interesting, they're about to snuff it to make a main character's emotions more compelling in response.

But if you stay with us past our MAJOR SPOILERS warning about ten minutes in, we'll take you with us through the rest of the book, and talk about the kinds of conversations these ensigns get into, and what they decide to do about the way their fate has been, shall we say, written in the stars.

Plus, does Job (you know, the Bible one we always bring up?) count as the first Redshirt, a plaything in the hands of heaven? Come find out, Believers!

I know, I know -- we've covered Alien before. But, turns out, going back to meet the creature all over again is part of the point of film after film after film. We dive into why that is with guest Sarah Welch-Larson (@dodgyboffin on Twitter, etc).

She's written a book called Becoming Alien: The Beginning and End of Evil in Science Fiction's Most Idiosyncratic Film Franchise, and she takes us through some of her most fun insights. The book holds up a feminist theological lens to the Alien films, drawing on Dr Catherine Keller's The Face of the Deep to make the case that a little chaos might get us closer to truth than trying to order everything perfectly, and that the unsettling work of the Alien films helps us learn what that's like from our favorite monster from the deep end of space.

Are subversive endings a good thing in this series? Is the audience the punchline of Alien Resurrection? Does wandering over and over get us closer to truth than standing still with good answers? Come find out (or wander around wondering with us) on this episode of Comic Belief! But be warned, you might never read Genesis or Job the same way ...Show notes:

Signed copies of Sarah's book:

https://mzsworldstore.com/products/becoming-alien-the-beginning-and-end-of-evil-in-science-fictions-most-idiosyncratic-film-franchise-paperback-signed

 

Publisher sales of the book:

https://wipfandstock.com/9781725283008/becoming-alien/

 

Dr Catherine Keller's The Face of the Deep:

https://www.routledge.com/The-Face-of-the-Deep-A-Theology-of-Becoming/Keller/p/book/9780415256490

Happy Halloween! Everyone waiting for the next surprise? It's an episode on Lovecraft Country, for us. We had some thoughts, here. A white author tries to write about a black family using the X-Files formula and Lovecraftian horror themes ... then the book gets picked up by HBO for a pulpy series. Do the pieces fit together?

We find some favorite theological ideas about names and power, who gets to go adventuring, and whose stories get told, and by whom. There's a lot of Genesis connections, here. We also talk about where white supremacy's power winds up as it loses its grip on the magic in this show, what temptations that carries, and how that stacks up against other ideas put forth by Black Panther or Watchmen.

And as is so often the case with a good horror film, we point out where the scariest parts of Lovecraft Country come not from the fake monsters, but the real horrors that get mixed in. Check it out, Believers!

Oh sure, like you didn't grow up wishing you could sneak past a wall into a fantasy land to prove you were worth dating to your crush. No? Just us?

We're joined by guest host Ashley Roberts, longtime friend of Megan's (and Ben's) and early-adopter of Comic Belief! She's jumping in on one of her favorite films -- a cult classic with a cast that can only be described as, ahem, stellar.

Seriously, Stardust has everything we want from popcorn fantasy cinema. Swords and horses and magic. Big name actors hamming it up as ridiculous characters. Robert De Niro as a sky pirate harvesting lightning. Michele Pfeifer as an immortal witch using her last dregs of youth to cast and curse her way back to beauty. A young Charlie Cox daring to devil us with his acting potential way before he mainlined a Marvel tv series.

And ultimately, some fun stuff about growing up and leaving a legacy. Turns out we really ARE supposed to grow beyond the walls of our first village lives.