As sheriff, Paul Billings is responsible for maintaining social order. Similarly Saul—as a sanctioned persecutor—can also be understood as trying to maintain a sense of social order by punishing those spreading ‘radical’ beliefs. Just as Billings’ questioning of authority alters his worldview, Saul’s was altered while traveling to Damascus. These two figures and their stories invite us to consider three types of beliefs that inform how we treat each other: (meta) physical beliefs, social beliefs, and psychological beliefs.

Constructivist analyses of Black Panther, Luke Cage, and Bishop help reveal some of the ways superheroes, despite their consistent motivations and frequent predictability (e.g., in terms of the motivations of many of their villains, use of violence, etc.), are both socially responsive to and adaptive within their differing social contexts. They are embedded in varied social interactions and relationships–an embeddedness that has implications for both pedagogy and scholarship.

By trying to understand the nature of the decisions made by such a complex and multifaceted character (the X-Man Bishop)—one who, despite occupying various positions within and outside of the law across dystopian and non-dystopian social arrangements, consistently fights to alter them in the face of injustice—we may come to a slightly better understanding of ourselves.

Van der Ven suggests the role of subjective interpretations should be accounted for when thinking about how people may experience morally laden situations and the conflicting moral interpretations that may  result….Applied to TWD, it is possible for individuals who vary in their assumptions or beliefs about the post-zombie world to interpret the same morally laden act differently.

...there are some parallels between the narrative Siddiq tells the community following the Whisperers attack, and the narrative represented by Christ’s resurrection. In both, narratives of hope offer alternative understandings of the world, each other, and our relationships. They also invite us to engage in a different set of relations with regards to (1) the features of the events we experience as well as (2) with one another.