The God Tube: Uncovering the Hidden Spiritual Message in Pop Culture

by James Lawler

Overview

Beginning with The Simpsons and ending with The Da Vinci Code, the entertaining sections in this book uncover profound philosophical and religious ideas in pop culture. Each work covered contains a challenge to both standard religious orthodoxy and secular science. In The Simpsons Movie, although Homer must be dragged off his couch to church, he experiences a spiritual epiphany with an Inuit shaman woman. In the film of The Da Vinci Code, Robert Langdon proposes that “the human is the divine.” The author makes a striking case here for pop culture as a hotbed of alternative thinking.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812696486
Publisher:	Open Court Publishing Company
Publication date:	12/28/2010
Pages:	256
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction vii

1 Between Duty and Desire: Morality in The Simpsons 1

2 From Illusion to Reality: The Matrix of the Good Society 26

3 The Multidimensional Universe of Buffy the Vampire Slayer 60

4 Blinding the Eyes of Justice: Woody Allen's Tale of Crime and Punishment 87

5 Realizing the Highest Good: The Power of Love in the Matrix Trilogy 117

6 Dialectics of the Force in Star Wars 141

7 Turning to the Dark Side: The Problem of Evil in Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Darth Vader 162

8 Faith with Reason: Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ 190

9 The Real Secret of The Da Vinci Code 216

10 The Platonic Wisdom of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene 258

Epilogue 287

Index 289