My piece on Breaking Bad and what it teaches us about sin ran after the show’s finale last fall. Since then, The Washington Post has sold their “On Faith” blog to faithstreet and migrated all of its articles to the new site. You can read about their relaunch of “On Faith” from the editor Patton Dodd here.
The new home has a great look and feel, and they scored some good pieces since the relaunch.
For those interested in an old series, my piece can be found here.
With Sunday night’s airing of the series finale of AMC’s “Breaking Bad,” the show’s audience finally has a complete work from which we can attempt meaningful interpretation. So what was the show was actually about?
Of course, one of the main elements of the story, perhaps the driving element, was the destructive and ultimate dehumanizing effects of sin. This point was obvious from the first season of the show as many critics have pointed out. I think the popularity of the show, however, was a direct result of how the theme of sin’s destruction/dehumanization was worked out through exceptionally well-done storytelling and characterization.
Here are five lessons about sin we can learn from the five seasons of the award-winning show.
1. Self-destructive behavior often stems from old wounds and festering bitterness. In the first episode of season one, we meet the character of Walter White, a man deeply embittered by a life that is not the picture of success he had expected in his younger years. We see him acting out, yelling at Bogdan, his boss at the car-wash, and assaulting the jerks in the store who make fun of son with special needs. These public explosions betray the infection of discontent and jealousy that had festered long before he ever stumbled upon that meth lab during Hank’s ride-along.
Read it all here.