Read NY Times Op-Ed Columnist Ross Douthat here. He opens up the cancerous body of work and operates from head to toe, noting that Brown isn’t just your run of the mill anti-Catholic bigot, but an avant garde DIY hater of organized religion in general:

“Piggybacking on the fascination with lost gospels and alternative Christianities, he serves up a Jesus who’s a thoroughly modern sort of messiah — sexy, worldly, and Goddess-worshiping, with a wife and kids, a house in the Galilean suburbs, and no delusions about his own divinity.

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.”

That’s right folks. Douthat’s calling him a liar. In the NY Times. Sweet.

As a side note, I went to this Theology on Tap last week that, contrary to its description, was a thorough treatment of the book and movie, “Angels and Demons,” along with a fantastic overview of the Church’s teaching on art and film. Dr. Daniel VanSlyke, Associate Professor of Church History at Kenrick-Glennon Seminary in St. Louis, was great, if not an eensy weensy bit long-winded. I’ll post the audio when I get it.

Do read the article. It’s not a sound bite, hyper-summarized, bite size chunk of cultural niceties and theoretic sentamentalism, so don’t expect something that the average Facebook user would read and dig. It’s probably not something your average artsy fartsy person would dig either. Average, I said. It’s edgy, and a little (wee) bit long, but it’s worth the perseverance. So read it. It might offend you, and that’s okay I say. Truth offends. If we had more people willing to offend the Church we’d be in a much different place in respect to many things today.

Favorite quotes:
“A nearly universal response to contemporary art today–one that impressively transverses race, creed age, or class–is ‘What?’”

“The decades to follow gave us conceptual art, landscape art, performance art, outsider’s art, found art, and (most revealingly perhaps) auto-destructive art.”

“The cult of celebrity–with its exorbitant votive prices–drives the art world today, leaving envy and resentment in its wake: a convocation of belligerent eagles.”

“We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another–doubtless very different–St. Benedict.” And lo, our Benedict has come.” [Props to Matt for the B16 reference--check his flickr account for his pics from the April Pope visit]