I was the guest on an episode of God and Comics where Fr. Jonathan, Fr. Matt, Fr. Kyle, and I discussed Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2. We talked about the film's humor and its depiction of surrogate space families. We went in-depth into the theology of Ego the Living Planet, a character who claims a god-like mantle for himself. Does he represent inaccurate images of god in the popular imagination? Or pagan ideas of gods as scaled-up humans? Possibly the only podcas

"Enter a mysterious cosmic being claiming to be Peter Quill’s long-lost father. His name is Ego, and he is a living planet—but he creates a humanoid avatar (played by Kurt Russell) to interact with the universe, especially the son he never knew. The Guardians are wary of this self-proclaimed god (“with a lowercase g,” he modestly adds) but they pay a visit to his planet—which, again, is he—so Quill can bond with his divine deadbeat dad. Ego lies at the intersection of two of

"Zombies, as popularized by George Romero in Night of the Living Dead and currently depicted on The Walking Dead, are mindless, rotting, infected corpses that hunger for human flesh. The classic zombie’s movement is invariably described as “shambling.” Jesus, by contrast, is trampling down death by death, as the Orthodox Paschal troparion puts it. The accounts in the Gospels of Jesus’s post-Resurrection appearances suggest that his body is not decaying and necrotic but glorio