How to Live when the World's on Fire

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire opens this week. Homiletics takes a look.

The Hunger Games trilogy is huge. First, you have the books. The trilogy, written by Suzanne Collins, has sold well over 50 million copies and has surpassed Harry Potter as the bestselling series, ever, on Amazon.com. Not only that, but you have the movies starring Academy Award winner Jennifer Lawrence. The first installment was released in 2012 and, between box office receipts and DVD sales, took in more than 1 billion dollars. Huge. And now, the second film, entitled The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, has been released, and there's no reason to believe that this film will do anything other than continue the trend of drawing in audiences, raking in cash and being, well, huge.

For those 38 people in the world who haven't read the books or seen the films or overheard anyone from a middle-school boy to a middle-aged mom talking it up with friends, here's the premise. It's post-apocalyptic North America. A country called Panem now exists where the government is corrupt, and 12 poor states, ...