If you follow Barbara Nicolosi’s Church of the Masses blog, you know that she’s lately gotten hooked on the new Battlestar Galactica television show. She recently wrote a great post wrestling with whether or not BSG is a good show—in the moral sense. (Caution—her post contains major spoilers for the show.) I love the way Nicolosi approaches art, asking questions like:

I have been brooding over whether the worldview of Battlestar Galactica can ultimately be reckoned moral or immoral. What is the show’s underlying presumption about human life, and can it be said to be true or a lie? And if it is a lie, it is the kind of lie that is appropriate in art – a false vision that would provoke people to seek out the truth?

Questions like this cut a lot deeper than “how much swearing/sex/violence does it have?” Not that content-based questions aren’t valuable, but they can be misleading if that’s all we use to evaluate whether a piece of art is morally good or not. A bleak, unpleasant work of art can point to ultimate truth, and a squeaky-clean work of art might not. At any rate, if you don’t mind the BSG spoilers, read Nicolosi’s analysis and think about how you might apply her approach to other films, TV shows, or books.