"And he asked me, Son of man, can these bones live?" -- Ezekiel
Since releasing the first novels in "The Zombie Bible," I've heard from a lot of readers asking me what zombies have to do with the Bible -- or what the Bible has to do with zombies. The answer is a lot, and I'm not just talking about the Bible's numerous references to either the risen dead or the restless dead.
After all, Western religion asks a series of nearly unanswerable questions: How do we, as a community, manage the excesses of human passion and drive? How do we maintain a just community while living in a world that wants to eat us? Is there a God in that world, and if there is, does he love us?
And though they lurch out of left field and are rarely written by philosophers or theologians, zombie stories tend to stalk down these same questions and chew their way right into them.
Let's take a look.
Zombies and God
Zombie stories invite us to write for ourselves a secular theology of the dead. And to our battered world here in the early 21st century, that elusive theology remains a uniquely appealing one.
Stant Litore is the author of 'The Zombie Bible,' a fiction series that retells biblical stories as chronicles in humanity's long struggle with hunger and with the hungry dead.