seminars. WATCHMEN AND UBERMENSCH Terry Wandtke  (3 sessions) Alan Moore's Watchmen offered a self-reflective indictment of hitherto unquestioned superhero fundamentals: power and reckless violence -- paving the way, ironically, for a wave of even more nihilistic comic book heroes. This seminar explores this most interesting conversation in contemporary comics and graphic novels, examining larger questions implicit in super powers. Terry Wandtke teaches literature, film and culture studies at Judson University. He is the editor of The Amazing Transforming Superhero: Essays on the Revision of Characters in Comic Books, Film, and Television. HEROES VILLIANS & MONSTERS Lynnette Porter  (3 sessions) Recent superhero mythology is going gray: the Petrelli brothers on TV's Heroes and the Dark Knight blur the heroic and the villainous. Iron Man finds moral power in technology. Wolverine leverages "Otherness" in ways that question all norms. This seminar considers super- ambiguities as moral confusion or hidden contradictions among "Good Guys" and "Bad Guys". Lynnette Porter is author or coauthor of books on topics that include The Lord of the Rings, TV series Lost and Battlestar Gallactica, and Saving the World: A Guide to Heroes. WITH GREAT POWER COMES GREAT RESPONSIBILITY Gabriel McKee  (3 sessions) Despite the deconstructed superness of Watchmen et al, the original point of superheroes wasn't to make us wish we had superpowers -- though that certainly would be fun! -- but rather to make us wish for the clear moral discernment that allows superheroes to do the right thing. The creators of the most influential superheroes -- immigrants or children of immigrants like Siegel and Schuster or Jack Kirby -- used their creations to imagine a better world where the powerless had a stronger voice. This seminar explores superheroes as champions of the downtrodden, and notions of superhero morality. Gabriel McKee is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and wrote The Gospel According to Science Fiction: From the Twilight Zone to the Final Frontier. His blog is "SF Gospel." BEING SPECIAL: HEROIC ATTEMPTS AT PERSONAL SIGNIFICANCE Cliff Williams  (3 sessions workshop) What's so special about being special? For Christians, human specialness is vindicated in the Incarnation. For Nietzsche, Christ is trumped by the Superman. Ernest Becker debunked hero stories we tell ourselves and others. Kierkegaard championed authentic individuals in a phony world. This seminar questions our assumptions about being special. Cliff Williams teaches philosophy at Trinity College and wrote The Life of the Mind , Singleness of Heart, and One More Train to Ride: The Underground World of Modern American Hoboes. AB/USES OF ENCHANTMENT: INKLINGS AND/OR DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR Andrew Lazo  (3 sessions) Salmon Rushdie feared that if Dorothy felt Kansas was her real home, Oz was just humbug. Richard Dawkins would agree: myth is a useless delusion. C. S. Lewis and Tolkien knew well the joys, dangers and deceptions of both Kansas and Oz -- and the difference between them. Following the Inklings, this seminar maps geographies of wicked and wondrous enchantment. Andrew Lazo writes and speaks widely on C. S. Lewis and for the C. S. Lewis Foundation, for whom he is a Field Representative. He teaches literature at the University of Houston and wrote Mere Christians: Inspiring Encounters with C. S. Lewis. GOD IN THE DETAILS: THE ECSTASY OF THE ORDINARY Jason Peters  (3 sessions) In Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, Binx Bolling learned that abstract keys to life are less pertinent to human existence than the particulars of living. Flannery O'Connor agreed, finding God in the details of her own fiction in ordinary existence. This seminar follows Binx's search, from the Vertical to the Horizontal, the same route traveled, not coincidentally, in the Incarnation. Jason Peters teaches and has written on British and American literature and edited the book Wendell Berry: Life and Work. He is an associate professor of literature at Augustana College. JUSTICE (& MERCY) LEAGUE: SAINTS AS SUPERHEROES Ross Martinie Eiler  (3 sessions) The saints have inspired Christians to live the Gospel and resist principalities in different cultures, times and ways. Though their stories are often larger-than-life, the saints weren't superheroes but ordinary sinners like ourselves who let themselves be transformed by the love of God. This seminar will look at saints -- the meek, the martyrs, and the miracle workers -- as heroes of the church, and will ask whether such powers are still attainable for mere mortals. Ross Martinie Eiler dropped out of the PhD program at the University of Chicago to join the Catholic Worker movement. He co-founded the Bloomington Christian Radical Community. info (ATsign) cornerstonefestival.com | (773) 989-2087 Cornerstone Festival, 920 W. Wilson, Chicago, IL 60640 © 2009, Cornerstone Communications, Inc.