At the climax of the recent wannabe-blockbuster film The Suicide Squad, a giant mind-controlling starfish is wreaking havoc across a nondescript non-American city when the team of super-villains (who are, from a story perspective, the heroes of the movie) must make a decision. Having completed their assigned mission, they are ordered by their cold, calculating, and utterly consequentialist supervisor to walk away and leave the innocent people of this foreign land to be massacred by an interstellar invertebrate, presumably because it would be good for America. The team is warned that disobedience will result in their immediate deaths, but they turn around in an existentialist blaze of glory and decide to go kill everyone in sight who is against peace. Mostly, that’s the starfish and his mind-controlled zombie army.
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Matthew Loftus
Matthew grew up in a family of 15 children and completed his medical training in Baltimore, Maryland. Since 2015, he and his family have lived in East Africa, where he currently teaches and practices Family Medicine at a mission hospital. His work has appeared in outlets such as The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Atlantis, and Mere Orthodoxy and his first book is forthcoming from InterVarsity Press. You can learn more about his work and writing at www.matthewandmaggie.org and preorder his forthcoming book here: https://www.ivpress.com/resisting-therapy-culture
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