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yallerdawg

(16,104 posts)
Tue Mar 27, 2018, 10:14 AM Mar 2018

The spiritual message hidden in 'Star Wars'

Source: CNN, by Daniel Bourke

George Lucas, the creator of "Star Wars," says he wanted to do more than entertain the masses. He wanted to introduce young Americans to spiritual teachings though "new myths" for our globalized, pluralistic millennium.

"I see 'Star Wars' as taking all the issues that religion represents and trying to distill them down into a more modern and accessible construct," Lucas has said. "I wanted to make it so that young people would begin to ask questions about the mystery."

In this, Lucas sounds a lot like his mentor, Joseph Campbell, a scholar who studied world myths. Campbell argued that all cultures impart their values to the next generation through archetypal stories. He believed the same about organized religion, but said it must "catch up" to the "moral necessities of the here and now."

A new study of young former Catholics, conducted by St. Mary's Press Catholic Research Group and Georgetown University's Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate, found that more blamed their family for the decision to leave the church than the church institution itself. Only 11% said they quit Catholicism because they oppose the church or religious institutions in general.

The study also found that nearly half had joined other religious communities, including other Christian ones. So is organized religion really the issue here?

It's no secret that we're living during a time of seismic shifts, from technology to politics to spirituality. It's not so much an "era of changes," Pope Francis has said, as a "change of eras."

So what's the leader of a 2,000-year-old church to do?

The answer is not resurrecting "obsolete practices and forms," Francis says. Some Catholic customs, while beautiful, "no longer serve as means of communicating the Gospel."

Which brings us back to the spiritual message encoded in "The Last Jedi."

As Luke prepares to torch the tree containing the sacred Jedi texts, Yoda appears out of nowhere and does the deed himself, cackling all the while.

"Time it is," Yoda says, "for you to look past a pile of old books."

Read it all at: https://www.cnn.com/2018/01/26/us/star-wars-religion/index.html


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The spiritual message hidden in 'Star Wars' (Original Post) yallerdawg Mar 2018 OP
Hidden? edhopper Mar 2018 #1
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