- I learned (via Justin Taylor's blog Between Two Worlds), about this useful website set up by Westminster Theological Seminary.
- Ben Witherington of Asbury Theological Seminary reviews the movie. Update 5/24/09: Christianity Today reviews the movie here, and Plugged In here.
- In a New York Times op-ed, "Dan Brown's America," Ross Douthat says,
It isn’t just that he [Dan Brown, author of "The Da Vinci Code", and "Angels and Demons"] knows how to keep the pages turning. That’s what it takes to sell a million novels. But if you want to sell a 100 million, you need to preach as well as entertain — to present a fiction that can be read as fact, and that promises to unlock the secrets of history, the universe and God along the way.
Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots, he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers
don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.” He’s working in the same genre as Harlan Coben and James Patterson, but his real competitors are ideologues like Ayn Rand, and spiritual gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. He’s writing thrillers, but he’s selling a theology.
Douthat says that to understand why Dan Brown is popular is to grasp the state of religion in America today.