Have you seen the classic cult movie "Night of the Living Dead"?  Not that I am recommending it--as a movie, it has some very odd and unsettling moments--but I thought about it the other day in terms of how we define personhood.  That is, how do we understand ourselves as human beings?

     Although I clearly cannot address this question fully in a single blog, I call your attention to H. G. Wells's novel War of the Worlds.  While we can say much about this movie, including Orson Welles's frightening adaptation of it for radio in the early twentieth century, my focus here is how it seems to address our very human fear of losing who we are.  As the story goes, though aliens threaten the planet physically, and humans fear the destruction such beings may cause, they also seem to fear how the aliens might take them over:  how the aliens may cause them to lose who they, as humans, are.

     Isn't this one of our greatest fears, to lose who we are?  After all, in a finite world, all we have is ourselves; if we lose "us," we do not know where to go.  Consider Romanian playwright Eugene Ionesco's play "Rhinoceros."  It portrays a world in which every human being is turning into a rhinoceros.  Finally, only one person is left.  He is defiant, however, and insists he will not succumb.  Nevertheless, eventually, he does.

     And no humans are left.

     It's almost enough to believe that there is something greater than us in the universe, something, indeed, someone, a very personal someone who, when we are falling apart, continues to hold us, and the cosmos, together.

     Truth be told, I do not think any of us wishes to be a zombie.