Unitarians sink teeth into vampire-zombie discussions

Monday, 29 October 2007

On 24 October, the Unitarian Campus Ministry hosted a discussion led by local arts journalist Gilbert Bouchard titled Vampires, Zombies and Consciousness.

The Unitarian church has only recently joined the Campus Ministry and is seeking to establish a presence on campus by initiating an open house and a series of discussions, beginning with vampires and zombies. As campus Unitarian Chaplain Reverend Audrey Brooks explained, the Unitarians’ open house and first talk was geared around vampires and zombies because it’s a very current topic, especially this time of year.

“Many people, for many, many years, have been sending kids out on Halloween and dressing them up in costumes of vampires and ghosts and zombies and so on, for trick-or-treating, but don’t understand the concept behind it,” Brooks said.

Beyond the timely aspect of Halloween being around the corner, Brooks explained that there are other motivations to discussing vampires and zombies. With so much literature and coverage on the topic of vampires, Brooks believes that these undead icons are reflecting current world issues.

“There is so much turmoil in the world and so many disasters [...] that people are looking at archetypes of life and death, and they are trying to interpret those in creative ways,” Brooks said.

“Concepts of peace and war and justice and human rights are being skewed and discarded. I think that the vampire-zombie-ghost kind of world mirrors the kind of fears people have about normal becoming un-normal.”

Bouchard feels that the church is uniquely positioned to host the discourse on these subjects because the religion is based on a set of principles and is open to other ideas.

“One of the reasons we can have this discussion is because Unitarians are an open-source religion. Instead of having a central text we consider a ‘holy text,’ we actually can apply our faith to the world as a whole. So one of the things about having a Unitarian discussion group is we can talk about anything we want,” he said.

Bouchard also added that Unitarianism isn’t so much about recruiting people or projecting a specific view on vampire or zombies but to figure out why people are interested in the subject matter.

“The challenge is that we live in a society where people are fascinated with this subject matter—and it is a subject matter—that has deep philosophical, spiritual, intellectual ramifications,” he said. “So the question is what does it mean for our society—what does it mean for us in a [Unitarian] group?”

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