Book Drop: Spider-Man & Faith
Voyage Comics, a small Catholic publisher, has just come out with a new collection of essays on Christian Truth in the Spider-Verse. Three of my essays are included. Two I had previously written for their blog. One was the kick-off article for my series, The Superheroes’ Guide to Catholic Social Teaching; one was a review of the 2019 film Spider-Man: Far From Home.
The third, written specifically for this book, is a reflection on the classic Spider-villain Wilson Fisk (aka the Kingpin) through the Psalmist’s laments of how the wicked prosper. An excerpt follows.
The Poor Man is Devoured by the Pride of the Wicked
Wilson Fisk makes his debut in Amazing Spider-Man #s 50-51 as an organized-crime boss seeking to assert his dominance over the city’s underworld. The first criminal activities that bring him to Spider-Man’s attention come in the form of a standard protection racket: he sends his men out to collect money from local business owners, in exchange for not bullying and intimidating their businesses. Kind of the adult version of the bully taking kids’ lunch money.
It serves as a harsh reminder that the quickest and surest way to wealth and prosperity is for the rich and powerful to take the earnings of those who work to earn it and give it over to those who don’t. And while our politicians will often frame this as a problem of the “welfare state” funneling money down to the poor and destitute, Biblical texts suggest that God is far more concerned with money going upward – from workers to those who oversee them.
“Behold, the wages you withheld from the workers who harvested your fields are crying aloud, and the cries of the harvesters have reached the ears of the Lord of hosts” (James 5:4), and “you shall not exploit a poor and needy hired servant” (Dt 24:14). The Church too reminds us too, as Pope Leo XIII writes in Rerum Novarum, that “there is a dictate of nature more imperious and more ancient than any bargain between man and man, that the remuneration must be enough to support the wage earner in reasonable and frugal comfort.”
When we read about corporations posting record profits while their employees must rely on government assistance to supplement their paychecks, this is an example of this sin that cries out to heaven for justice.
To read more, check out Spider-Man & Faith: Essays on Christian Truth in the Spider-Verse from Voyage Comics, available from their website at https://shop.voyagecomics.com/collections/books/products/spider-man-faith-essays-on-christian-truth-in-the-spider-verse