Zombie Alleluias: Learning to Live in the Space Between Worlds

This essay was delivered as the Baer Seminar on Pastoral Care at an alumni/ae reunion of Princeton Theological Seminary on October 22, 2013, and at a Princeton Seminary alumni/ae gathering at Preston Hollow Presbyterian Church in Dallas, Texas, on February 10, 2014. It considers an increasing fascination with zombies in recent American cultural life as a means by which individuals attempt to cope with anxieties related to the rise of political and religious extremism in the post-9/11 landscape. Building on Freud’s recognition of fundamentalist tendencies within the human psyche and his sense that modern persons are living psychologically “beyond their means,” it calls for an empathic embrace of the complexities of what Donald Capps deems the “ecumenical self” as a path toward engaging personal threats within and without.