Trinity Mount Barker

Once upon a time I subscribed to the New York Times. I don't any more. I decided I couldn't justify the getting the Paper of Record posted to me every day! I still use the website a lot and noticed that Ross Douthat has now joined the NY Times team as a contributor. Douthat is the film critic for the National Review and joined The Gray Lady only last month.

It will be interesting to see how his view on American Life is received by the Times' readership. Douthat's latest opinion piece Dan Brown's America pokes some holes in the current fascination with Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons (along with the slew of copy cat pseudo-historical-religious-conspiracy-revisionist-thrillers those works have inspired).

His sharp assessment of Dan Brown's approach to novel writing is clear:

But the success of this message — which also shows up in the work of Brown’s many thriller-writing imitators — can’t be separated from its dishonesty. The “secret” history of Christendom that unspools in “The Da Vinci Code” is false from start to finish. The lost gospels are real enough, but they neither confirm the portrait of Christ that Brown is peddling — they’re far, far weirder than that — nor provide a persuasive alternative to the New Testament account. The Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — jealous, demanding, apocalyptic — may not be congenial to contemporary sensibilities, but he’s the only historically-plausible Jesus there is.

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