Finding God on NPR -- and Monster Movies

My commuting time this weeks been a bit more enjoyable, thanks to some thought provoking religion pieces on NPR.

Purist might think that Hellboy hardly qualifies as a religion story, but a movie and comic book about a orphaned demon baby who fights evil--it works for me. So does this Morning Edition piece on Hellboy creator Mike Mignola.

If you've not seen Mignola's creepy, haunting, but humorous comic, you'll be in for a treat. And Morning Edition got the quote of the week for this from Hellboy director
Guillermo del Toro.

Like Mignola, del Toro believes that folklore is a way of making sense of history -- and the human experience.

"We both believe that anything you want to learn about people, you can learn from monster movies," del Toro says. "And anything about monsters, you can learn from the evening news."

You've got that right.

Chicago Public Radio' Eight Forty Eight is running a weeklong series called "In Search of the Soul" -- on how people define the soul and where it goes when we die.

Contributor Judy Valente talks with an undertaker who prepared her own mother's body for a funeral, a Catholic priest whose also a doctor working with terminally ill patients, a Muslim chaplain at a cancer center, the family of a Jewish rabbi who died, a Buddhist monk, and even an atheist facing death.

I wanted so much to hear this series that I was tempted to show up late for work --it starts when I'm supposed to be at my desk.

Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I can listen to the series and still get to work on time. And so can you.