More spooky theology for October

If you haven’t yet seen the print version of our October issue, you’re in for a treat (but not a trick). Three cover stories and two more feature-length articles all explore the intersections of faith with topics like horror films, scary Bible stories, and ghosts. I’m not even a Halloween superfan, but this still might be my favorite issue of the Century to date, with all these rich reflections on related themes.

I’m thrilled to report that one of these pieces—a moving essay from my colleague Jessica Mesman—corresponds with our latest video on the CC YouTube channel! I chat with Jess about horror movies and her own experiences with religious horror. 

Plus more great content below, including a bonus throwback to an article from earlier this year. The world recently learned that the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature went to Jon Fosse, so we look back at Mac Loftin’s artful review of Fosse’s masterpiece Septology.

Email me: What do you think of the horror genre in movies, TV, and books?

Jon Mathieu
[email protected]

Prayer as mourning, mourning as prayer

“This is a vision of what we might call a melancholic faith, in which the death of Jesus is the loss that forever shapes us, an absence that promises by the very longing it provokes that love will escape abolition.”

Horror movie mom

“My kids say I remind them of Joyce in Stranger Things—the anxious mother who will do anything to protect the children of Hawkins, Indiana, from the dangers of the Upside Down. There is a resemblance; we have the same haircut, and yeah, Joyce is kind of a mess.”

VIDEO: Jessica Mesman on horror as therapy

Jon chats with CC associate editor Jess Mesman about the therapeutic value of art like Poltergeist, Stranger Things, The Babadook, and Midsommar.

In the Lectionary for October 15 (Ordinary 28A)

Where is the psalmist’s own voice in this communal confession and appeal?

Can dead things live again?

“What Jesus gives the widow in Luke 7 isn’t about the biology, about the natural or unnatural. Jesus gives her a new possibility.”

by Brian Bantum

Resisting as a way of life

“Living Resistance is a response to the gut punch of COVID and the rise of right-wing extremism. It is also Kaitlin Curtice’s map of her inner life and transformation.”

review by Allison Backous Troy