This post was originally given by Emily as a paper for DePaul University in Chicago’s Pop Culture Conference: A Celebration of Star Wars on May 4, 2024.
From its origins, Star Wars has been centrally concerned with our human struggle against the Machine. As early as 1973, Lucas wanted to depict “a large technological empire going after a small group of freedom fighters.”(1) Darth Vader is an emblem of encroaching technological domination and the loss of individual choice, vulnerability, and transcendent connection with others; the emblem of his Empire is a cog. But another Machine-man has, of late, come to dominate the franchise: the Mandalorian. Stories of Mandalorians reveal a rich heritage of belief and tradition. Yet they perennially hover on the brink of extinction—often due to their own technology and warlike ways. From Din Djarin to the Fetts to Sabine Wren, Mandalorians offer a nuanced—even ironic—exploration of Star Wars’ central concern with technology and how to use it without becoming it.
The Mandalorian; Disney/Lucasfilm
Many sources inform Lucas’ preoccupation with machine existence in Star Wars. One is arguably most important: Arthur Lipsett’s 1963 art-house short for the National Film Board of Canada entitled 21-87. It is a mind-blowing 10-minute experience, available on the National Film Board of Canada’s website. Lipsett was a scavenger who pieced together his colleagues’ rejected material into highly symbolic montages. 21-87 juxtaposes images and audio of modern, machine-based existence (always absurd or horrific) with those of human suffering and of humans in natural, dignified states of wonder. The film derives its name from a recorded discussion about the mechanization of society. A voice, arguing mechanization fulfills the human desire to “fit in,”(2) says, “And somebody walks up and you say, ‘Your number’s 21-87, isn’t it?’ Boy, does that person really, uh, smile.”(3) This audio is repeated at film’s end, leaving the impression that the Machine Age will triumph—if we let it. Lucas watched the film two dozen times as a student, fascinated by its grim message about the Machine age as a threat to our humanity, yet also the potential of nature, art and transcendent spiritual connection to overcome it. (In the film, Lipsett featured recorded dialogue calling such spiritual power and connection “a Force… or something,” and this phrase seems to have stuck in Lucas’ mind.)
As this year’s holy week and Triduum celebrations commence, I’d like to repost an article I wrote for another blog in 2017, soon after the release of a film that is often named as the best of the new Star Wars films: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016). Not only is this film in need of further attention here on Liturgy and Life, but the timing is good too: in the Great Paschal Triduum, Catholics celebrate the Paschal Mystery of Christ in a prolonged, three-day liturgy that begins on Holy Thursday, moves through the triumph of the cross on Good Friday and concludes at the Easter Vigil on Holy Saturday with the initiation of new members and a festive celebration of the Resurrection. A liturgist friend calls this three-day season (the shortest in the Church year) “Paschal-palooza,” and rightly so. During the Triduum, we Catholics perform the symbolically richest, most lavish rituals we have to glorify a God who saves us by sending his own son to show us what conformity to God’s will really means (spoiler alert: it’s death). Yet death does not have the last word, and we are sanctified by the saving power of Christ’s humility “to the point of death, even death on a Cross” (Phil. 2:8).
Rogue One always struck me as a film with a lot to teach us everyday people about the Paschal Mystery: the loving self-sacrifice that brings new life and new hope. In a 2023 “Actors on Actors” interview between Star Wars stars Hayden Christensen (Anakin Skywalker, Darth Vader) and Diego Luna (Cassian Andor), Luna reflects that what makes Rogue One (and its excellent, must-watch Disney+ spin-off Andor) special is there are no Jedi—the magic is absent from this corner of the galaxy far, far away. The ordinary people of these stories must rely on themselves—and only themselves—to solve galactic problems. They are, Luna said, “simple, regular people doing extraordinary things.” Christ’s ultimate actions are meant to inspire and guide us in the same way: he was one of us—our brother, our friend. Being more like Christ does not mean learning magic or developing superpowers. It means learning to listen to and follow the will of God. Any simple, ordinary person can do it, but one must have faith, hope and—above all—love. These three gifts are exemplified by characters in Rogue One.
The second of two collections of scholarly essays I’ve co-edited with Dr. Amy H. Sturgis is now released: Star Wars: Essays Exploring a Galaxy Far, Far Away was published in July by Vernon Press and is now available in hardcover and e-book formats! (See below for purchasing info and a discount code.) The first of our co-edited collections was released in May: a “twin” volume to this one, dedicated to Star Trek (check out my blog announcement with all the details on that volume by clicking here.) And importantly, you’re invited to some fabulous, virtual book launch events to celebrate! See below for all the details.
About the book
The book is a collection of ten essays exploring Star Wars from many different angles: from the evolution of how Twi’leks are treated in the franchise (and what that says about Star Wars‘ relationship to “the Other”) to how Star Wars and Harry Potter use similar storytelling devices to set their heroes on their destined paths, to the invented languages of Star Wars, to the way Star Wars tie-in media (books, comics, etc.) has developed over time and why that’s important. These essays are engaging, insightful, accessible, and as up-to-date as we could possibly make them, with significant treatments of new shows like Andor and The Book of Boba Fett. It also contains a beautiful foreword written by Ian Doescher, author of the Shakespearean Star Wars adaptations (which are brilliant, in case you’ve never read them).
I’m particularly excited about this book’s release because not only was I the lead editor for it, I also have a chapter in the book on a topic I am very passionate about: the influence of an obscure, 1964 art-house film, Arthur Lipsett’s 21-87, on Star Wars. In my chapter, I demonstrate how the central message of Lipsett’s film–a dire warning about the encroachment of technology on humanity’s ability to connect with nature, each other and the divine–becomes a central concern in all eras of Star Wars storytelling, from A New Hope to The Bad Batch and Andor (especially Andor!). Check back on the blog for more posts about Lipsett’s work and its importance to Star Wars that follow on from my chapter in the book.
Christmas in the Harry Potter saga is always special. In an already magical world, the Christmas scenes in Potter (always snowy!) bring a heightened sense of magic to the story, bordering on the religious. It’s telling that the story finally drops its first and only overt references to religion—two Christian scripture passages—on Christmas in the Godric’s Hollow churchyard scene in Deathly Hallows. Each and every Christmas, Harry somehow gets a glimpse of the type of hero he must become to solve the problem at hand, and that problem is always Voldemort: the problem of sin and death itself. Funnily enough, Christmas, in the Christian sense of salvation history, also manifests the hopeful beginnings of the solution to the problem of sin and death. This is no coincidence. At Christmas, Harry often receives important gifts to help him in his quest, just as humanity received the gift of Jesus Christ, the light of the world, to help and guide us on the way to eternal life. The gifts and lessons Harry receives every Christmas show him that his own heroism must be patterned after this same Christ in his incarnation: God who becomes human, to show us that true honor, true heroism and true godliness lie in humility and loving friendship.
In case you missed it, a brief, post-credit epilogue to the finale of season two of The Mandalorian on Disney+ teased a new Star Wars TV show, to be released in December of this year: The Book of Boba Fett. It’s a curious title for a television show, and for Star Wars, and for a show about Boba Fett. We don’t typically associate books with the Star Wars universe; datapads and holocrons yes, but books, when they appear, are antiquated Jedi accouterment, not things of bounty hunters.
A still from the teaser for The Book of Boba Fett. Image property of Lucasfilm/Disney.
I have a confession to make. Mass this past Sunday included a reading from the book of the prophet Jonah, and in the quiet space after the homily, my mind churned with thematic possibilities for Boba Fett, undoubtedly while I should have been praying. Whoops. But Star Wars has a penchant for incorporating Biblical themes into its narratives, increasingly so under Dave Filoni, whose creative hand shapes Star Wars television. For example, in Star Wars: Rebels, Biblical names like Kanan and Ezra orient audiences to their respective characters: an exiled, wayward Jedi and the prophetic Padawan who brings him home. Thus supposing Biblical imagery will inform The Book of Boba Fett is no great stretch (or sin, I hope); the show’s enigmatic title already lends a scriptural gravitas. And it doesn’t take a scripture scholar to align Boba Fett with the prophet Jonah, with whom he shares the strange experience of misadventuring himself into the belly of a great beast. And yet both are spared.
This past weekend, over 100 Potter scholars from all over the world attended the 9th annual Harry Potter Academic Conference, hosted by Chestnut Hill College. The conference was a great success by all accounts, and now that it’s complete, I thought I’d share my conference offering: a digital paper on the way all the many food images in Harry Potter point to the Eucharist. Please enjoy this with a hot glass of butterbeer! (And if you have a recipe you like better, please post in the comments.)
Emily’s conference talk for the 2020 Harry Potter Academic Conference at Chestnut Hill College
Hope to see you (digitally or otherwise) at next year’s Chestnut Hill Harry Potter Academic Conference. Until then, let’s all try to manage the mischief, shall we?
The feast of the Immaculate Conception of Mary (December 8 most years, celebrated this year on December 9) confuses many people. On a basic level, some do not realize this feast celebrates Mary’s conception rather than the conception of her son, Jesus. Once this misunderstanding is cleared up, questions still linger. Why, when we’re preparing to celebrate the incarnation of God in the birth of Jesus Christ, would we pause to celebrate the conception of Jesus’ mother? What’s so special about the way Mary was conceived?
The short answer is: Mary’s conception was unique and essential to our redemption. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception declares that “To become the mother of the Savior, Mary ‘was enriched by God with gifts appropriate to such a role.’”[1] These “gifts” entailed nothing less than the grace of redemption, setting Mary apart from her human peers. When the angel Gabriel greeted her as “full of grace,” this freedom from sin, given her by God’s own hand, Catholics interpret, is what he was referring to.
If we were to
translate this idea into terms Harry
Potter fans could relate to, we might say Mary was a bit like a
Muggle-born. In Harry Potter, magic
occurs most often in magical families like the Weasleys, but it “pops up”
sometimes in Muggle families, as in the case of Hermione Granger and Lily Evans
Potter, Harry’s mother. While Mary’s conception was unique in the human race,
Muggle-borns are rare, but not unique. But Lily’s status as a Muggle-born – as
someone set apart from her peers by a particular grace – is one of a few
significant (and likely intentional) ways in which Lily Potter alludes to Mary,
the mother of Jesus.
To explain, let’s go back to Mary a moment. Mary was full of God’s grace from the start, and this redemptive grace had two primary and interrelated effects. First, it gave her a preliminary share in the redemption of the human race. Secondly this graced state in which Mary was conceived, born and lived afforded her the freedom to choose to participate in God’s plan of salvation. The angel Gabriel did not come to inform Mary that she was already pregnant with the Christ. Mary had the freedom to choose her response, and she said “yes.” Catholics call this Mary’s fiat, a Latin phrase that sums up her self-emptying response: “May it be done to me according to your word.”[2] In so doing, she, an insignificant young girl from a marginalized group (the Jews), played an important role in the redemption of the world. St. Irenaeus famously said that Mary, in her fiat, “became to herself and to the whole human race a cause of salvation.”[3]
image property of Warner Brothers’ pictures
The role of personal choice is an important theme in Harry Potter, and her birth into the magical community does not make Lily Evans’ key role in the eventual salvation of the world a fait accompli or a “done deal”. She must choose, constantly. She chooses to accept her invitation to Hogwarts, she chooses to marry James Potter and not Severus Snape, choosing (as it were) Gryffindor over Slytherin. She chooses to be a member of the Order of the Phoenix, fighting Voldemort rather than either joining him or giving up.
But one choice by Lily is ultimate: her free choice to throw herself in front of her infant son to protect him from Voldemort’s killing curse. Lily’s sacrifice is the essential forerunner of her son’s more important, more widely reaching sacrifice, and in this way she alludes to Mary. Both women made self-emptying choices: choices that made them willing vessels for the plans of others. Mary’s choice to accept a miraculous, extra-marital pregnancy threatened all her future plans – even, perhaps, her life and safety, had not Joseph chosen to accept and protect her. For Lily, the instinct to protect her son even at the cost of her own life afforded the ultimate plans of Albus Dumbledore to defeat Voldemort. Neither woman understood the plans of those “in charge,” but both agreed to play key roles, with trust and hope for the plans’ eventual successes.
Above I hinted that Lily’s allusive relationship with Mary the Mother of God may have been intentional on the part of the author. Our best evidence of such intentionality regards Lily’s name. Because of the lily’s traditional associations with purity, it became associated with Mary, who is often depicted holding lilies of white. Ferguson notes the lilium candidum, or “Madonna lily,” is among the most recognized symbols of the Virgin mother in Christian art.[4] Another way Lily Potter alludes to Mary (intentionally or un-) is through her youth and relative insignificance; she is Muggle-born, and thus marginal and vulnerable, as Mary’s Judaism made her. And as discussed above, Lily’s Muggle-born status alludes to Mary in a particular way, for while Harry’s father James, like Joseph, has a noble heritage,[5] Harry’s mother Lily, like Mary, is of far humbler origins. Yet in her, magic bubbles forth unexpectedly and completely.
Lily windows adorn a side entrance to the Church of the Steps, formally known as Immaculata Parish (named for Mary’s Immaculate Conception), in Cincinnati, Ohio. Photo by Emily.
Lily’s Muggle-born status makes her only offspring, Harry, a meeting place between the magic and non-magic worlds, just as Jesus, for Christians, is the axis mundi, the meeting place between heaven and earth.[6] This is why we celebrate the Immaculate Conception of Mary here in the midst of our preparations for Christmas – because Mary, like Lily, was born special, and her specialness shows us that an ordinary, lowly girl from humble origins, can, through graced cooperation with God’s plans, participate in the world’s redemption. Like Mary – and like Lily – we too are called to make self-emptying choices, hollowing ourselves out, as it were, putting aside our own ambitions and desires to make room for God’s plans. In celebrating the Immaculate Conception of Mary, we proclaim the possibility that through us, God can and will do “marvelous deeds.”[7]
[1]Catechism of the Catholic Church, para. 490; internal quotation is from Vatican
Council II’s Lumen Gentium, para. 56.
[2]
Luke 1:38, New
American Bible Revised Edition.
[3]
Irenaeus, Adversus
haereses,
XXII, 4 (180 A.D.).
[4]
George Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian Art (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 95.
[5]
That the Potters are
descended from the Peverell family can be assumed by James’ possession of the
Cloak Hallow.
[6]
Lily is not simply
born of Muggles, she’s born from the same Muggles who produced her sister,
Petunia, whose name is allusive to a lily which, in some interpretations of
Victorian floriography, invoked “anger and resentment.” (“Lily, Petunia and the
Language of Flowers,” Wizarding World
(formerly Pottermore), https://www.wizardingworld.com/features/lily-potter-petunia-and-the-language-of-flowers,
accessed 6 November 2019.) One must admit Petunia and her Dursley family are
the most Mugglish Muggles we meet in the series, and this makes Lily’s magical
ability even more surprising. For more on magic in Potter as an extended metaphor for the (Christian) life of grace,
see Emily Strand, “Harry Potter and the Sacramental Principle,” in Worship vol. 93 (Oct. 2019), 345-365.
The Hogwarts Express has come and gone, taking our magical children back for another exciting, evil-defeating year of enchanted education. We Muggles, left behind in this sometimes depressingly mundane world, must fend for ourselves, training our eyes (those windows to the soul) to seek out the magic that lies just under the surface of all things, for in that sparkling, numinous presence lies the true nature of existence, and our true purpose: to live like Christ – that is, to live for others, and in so living, never to die.
Well, that’s how I
see Harry Potter anyway.
But the pastor of a Catholic parish in Nashville, Tennessee disagrees. According to this article in the Tennessean, he has removed all the Harry Potter books from the new library at his parish school this fall. I’ll set out his reasoning (as reported in the article) and give my rebuttal, just like it’s 2002. In so doing, I hope also to demonstrate in some small way what Pope Francis has called the evil of clericalism – that is, any undue emphasis on the opinions, attitudes and actions of clerics over those they are meant to shepherd, simply because they are clerics. In my opinion, that is the real evil which underlies this particular situation.
Last year, my father died on the
day before Ash Wednesday. He was 85 years old, and he’d lived a wonderful,
respectable Christian life, full of charity toward others, including prison
ministry in his retirement. He’d enjoyed a fulfilling professional career, been
a good friend to many, and was happily married for over 50 years to a wonderful
woman with whom he’d raised a big, happy family. Letting go of this kind,
funny, intelligent and loving man was hard and sad, but something about it also
felt right. It was Dad’s time, and
we’ll all have our time.
Ash Wednesday invites us all to reflect on “our time” – to remember that indeed our time approaches, even if still far off. We wear ashes on our foreheads to symbolize, as a recent NPR article put it, that we are all “dust-creatures”. There is an impermanence to our earthly lives that we must never forget, lest we fail to live lives of charity and love with every breath. Psalm 95 says, “If today you hear God’s voice/harden not your hearts,” for tomorrow, you may be gone. On Ash Wednesday we remember that we are dust, and to dust we shall return.
One of the challenges of reading scripture in a college course in North America is the perceived saturation of any Christian text in a society in which Christianity dominates the religious landscape. When my students see the Gospel of Mark listed on the syllabus, they assume encountering the text will be a matter of review. “I mean, obviously, I’m a Christian, so I’ve read it before.” I hear this frequently, yet in teaching the text, I find many students have never read the Gospel the way they have read other assigned literary texts such as The Odyssey or Jane Eyre. They’ve heard the Gospel, but then only in snippets (or thematic extracts called pericopes). We can thank the various churches (mine included) for this; in proclaiming and studying scripture bit-by-bit (even, in some churches, phrase-by-phrase), we’ve created a “snippet” Christian scriptural culture, whose members struggle to put the whole story together and think critically about what it means, especially as members of the dominant culture. Continue reading “Pop Culture in the Classroom: Rogue One and the Gospel of Mark”
One of the challenges of reading scripture in a college course in North America is the perceived saturation of any Christian text in a society in which Christianity dominates the religious landscape. When my students see the Gospel of Mark listed on the syllabus, they assume encountering the text will be a matter of review. “I mean, obviously, I’m a Christian, so I’ve read it before.” I hear this frequently, yet in teaching the text, I find many students have never read the Gospel the way they have read other assigned literary texts such as The Odyssey or Jane Eyre. They’ve heard the Gospel, but then only in snippets (or thematic extracts called pericopes). We can thank the various churches (mine included) for this; in proclaiming and studying scripture bit-by-bit (even, in some churches, phrase-by-phrase), we’ve created a “snippet” Christian scriptural culture, whose members struggle to put the whole story together and think critically about what it means, especially as members of the dominant culture.