At the Pop Theology blog, another attempt to figure out the zombie craze, via review of a new collection of essays, Triumph of the Walking Dead.

It is based on the AMC series, but goes far beyond it.

From a pop theology perspective, the most interesting essays cover morality, meaning(lessness), personhood, race and gender, and redemption. In his essay, “Take Me to Your Leader,” Jonathan Maberry examines post-zombie morality through Rick’s position of leadership among the survivors. The most fitting conclusion, it seems, is to abandon all concerns of (im)morality because existence in this world requires amorality. Craig Fischer‘s “Meaninglessness: Cause and Desire in The Birds, Shaun of the Dead, and The Walking Dead,” offers a brief but fairly brilliant comparison of the three. Examining the “cause ” of the apocalyptic events of each film and the comic book series sheds informative light on the others. While they may all be related, in varying ways, to sexual desire, they could just as easily all be meaningless. Fischer makes a great case for Hitchcock’s The Birds as a “proto-zombie film” (69).

I still lean somewhat to the idea I was playing with last month, that “zombie apocalypse” is a why to mentally prepare yourself for life-or-death situations without having to consider killing your fellow humans. You always here about how a fighter must at least temporarily dehumanize the enemy—what is more “de-human” than a zombie?