Rous Douthat of the NY Times has an excellent opinion piece about the shallowness of American Christianity as related to the preachy thriller novels written by one Dan Brown. I’ll let you mosey on over to the Times to read (you have to login), but I will share the last paragraph:

For millions of readers, Brown’s novels have helped smooth over the tension between ancient Christianity and modern American faith. But the tension endures. You can have Jesus or Dan Brown. But you can’t have both.

Personally, I am keeping Jesus - the wide eyed, loving, fierce revolutionary God incarnate. Dan Brown’s Jesus is boring to me…very tame, normal. One wonders if the Jesus imagined today by many would even have been killed. Dan Brown’s conspiracy laden, action packed fiction is fun to read, but his theology and his Jesus are fiction of a much more yawnable variety. His Jesus could never have changed the world - the real Jesus is still doing so today.

Here at the POCBlog, we highly recommend Matthew, Mark, Luke and John for Jesus…and Star Trek for a good adventure flick.