The God-Man and Superheroes

Any excuse to include Captain America.

When the The Avengers' movie opened, I wrote about our need for heroes. This summer has been packed with a number of superhero movies. The Avengers and The Amazing Spiderman have already been released. Tonight, the highly anticipated Dark Knight Rises will open to sold out theaters. We seem to clamor to see these movies even when it seems they have been rebooted too soon. Why are we drawn to see these movies?

Father Robert Barron suggests in his article What Christ Can Teach Superheroes that what fascinates us about all these superheroes, and the comic books on which they are based, "has something to do with Christianity; more precisely, with the strange hybrid figure around which all of the Christian religion revolves." He posits that these superheroes are analogous to the God-man, Christ, who are "hybrid combinations of the extraordinary and the ordinary."

Read the rest of his article or view the two videos below to get Father Barron's complete insights.