REGINA – Monsters and other supernatural beings are part of many different world religions.
Take for example spirits of the dead, said University of Regina religious studies professor, Kevin Bond. In Asian cultures, ancestor spirits are often worshiped alongside deities.
This class is really about supernatural creatures that get left out of consideration in normal treatments of world religions.
“For instance, Godzilla is actually a modern re-imagining of very old conventional Japanese attitudes towards the spirit world,” he said.
He added, “Monsters are not these peripheral, unimportant things. They are often these very important, supernatural, divine agents. There’s often this very little dividing line between monsters and gods.”
Bond has jointly designed and instructs a religious studies course at the U of R with fellow professor, Bill Arnal called Ghosts, Monsters and Demons.
“This class is really about supernatural creatures that get left out of consideration in normal treatments of world religions,” Arnal explained.
The two professors want their students to think critically about their fears and anxieties and the monsters in religions and popular culture that represent those fears. “The word ‘monster’ actually comes from the Latin word which means ‘warn,'” said Bond. “It’s also perhaps a way to flirt safely with with dangerous specters, to exert some ritual control over them.”
“If we can think critically about something like Frankenstein or Dracula then that allows us to think critically also about not simply God or the church or religion, but the market, Canadian values, any of those sorts of culturally shared constructs that are very important to us,” said Arnal.
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