Do you love pop culture? Does the witness of Stephen King and Jordan Peele and Guillermo del Toro and the Marvel Cinematic Universe overlap with your own? There's a word for someone like you. You're a spirited anthropologist. Good news: You are not alone. With A Spirited Anthropology for Avatars, Heroes, and Assorted Undead, Tim Posada invites us to go deep with our obsessions and to think harder about what our pop culture artisans are showing us about ourselves, others, and God. Turns out there's data in our binge-watching. Take a look and see.

David Dark, author of Everyday Apocalypse: The Sacred Revealed in Radiohead, The Simpsons, and Other Pop Culture Icons and The Gospel According to America: A Meditation on a God-blessed, Christ-Haunted Idea

Tim Posada develops a distinctive method he calls spirited anthropology to explore how heroes, deities, monsters, computers, clowns, and fauns are brought to life in a wide range of cultural texts, including Pan's Labyrinth, Get Out, Watchmen, and American Gods. In A Spirited Anthropology for Avatars, Heroes, and Assorted Undead, he considers world-building as a form of artistic creation that is analogous to divine creation, paying close attention to the implicit and explicit theological concepts that animate so many cultural texts. Posada demonstrates time and time again, through his deeply engaging method of spirited anthropology, how some of the most popular movies, novels, short stories, and television shows of our time are actually asking profound questions about the ultimate meaning and purpose of human life.

Mark Eaton, author of Religion and American Literature since 1950 and co-editor of Historical Fiction Now

Good stories come in all sizes and shapes, but they share one thing in common-they scratch at truth, beauty, or goodness. In Tim Posada's terminology, the 'spirited anthropology' of many popular culture narratives invites dialogue with both our understanding of our own bodily existence and with our beliefs as to what our bodily existence ultimately means. A Spirited Anthropology for Avatars, Heroes, and Assorted Undead is more than a page turner. It is public theology at its best, an opportunity for popular culture to stir our own thinking about what it means that we are our bodies.

Robert K. Johnston, Senior Professor of Theology and Culture, Fuller Theological Seminary and co-author of Deep Focus: Film and Theology in Dialogue