Normally, I would reserve this sort of thing for Pop Culture and Theology, where not a few of my engagements of popular culture from a theological perspective have gone to live over the past few years, including one on The Mandalorian, religion, and ethnicity, relevant to today’s festivities. But given that this is the platform where I have the most speed to be able to write something and get it out in conjunction with a particular day, I have elected to write something on the subject here—specifically, that the Holy Spirit is absolutely the Force.
I was born in 1995, twelve years after Return of the Jedi and four years before The Phantom Menace. I was ten when Revenge of the Sith debuted, seventeen when Disney bought Lucasfilm and promised a new Star Wars trilogy, and twenty when The Force Awakens came out, when I managed to be among the first to see it in Missouri. I finished my first draft of my graduate thesis the afternoon before I went to see The Last Jedi; I was one year into my second graduate program when The Rise of Skywalker was released. Betwixt and between these, I grew up immersed in a variety of comics, television shows, and video games spun from or continuing the mainstream canonical story of the franchise, and like many a little boy who has been conscious in any way since 1978, Luke Skywalker was the first and most important heroic archetype for me, arguably well before I became conscious of Jesus as a human image of the divine. Star Wars has been a major force on my psychology, then, from the beginning of my life until the present, and so even if the reader is less than enchanted with the franchise, I will simply point out that I’d be deeply unlikely to have taken the interests that I have in the things that the reader perhaps cares more about, like religion, philosophy, history, psychology, or theology, had I not been shaped by such things early on. (Marvel and DC Comics are to blame here as well.) So I, at least, owe it to say something meaningful about such things, and leave the reader to decide their own level of interest.
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