Jan/Feb 2005 Current Issues Features Religion & Theology Features

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The early church was awash in gospels. Yet early bishops managed to winnow the field, and for well over a millennium, Christendom knew of just four "evangelists." In the gothic chapel of the seminary I attended, they stare down imposingly from niches above the altar, four carved figures with enigmatic expressions, sometimes looking a bit alarmed at the content of the sermons.

Do you suppose we could fit Tony Soprano in there somewhere?

On my desk, in addition to The Gospel According to Tony Soprano, are The Gospel According to Harry Potter, The Gospel According to The Simpsons, The Gospel According to Disney, The Gospel According to Tolkien, and The Gospel According to Dr. Seussa canon-within-a-canon of recent religious explorations of popular culture. Nearby is the coffee-table book The Gospel According to ESPN: Saints, Saviors, and Sinnersa cornucopia of photographs, charts, and essays on American athletes produced by ESPN itself. (Alas, restricting myself to nonfiction meant that I had to pass over Christopher Moore's 2003 novel Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal.)

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The success of Peanuts must have been something of a shock to John Knox Press, now Westminster John Knox. It was eight years until Knox tried a similar volume, to which Short contributed a foreword, and I sense something half-hearted in the title alone: The Gospel According to Andy Capp. Nor did the 1975 entry The Gospel According to the Wall Street Journal make much of a splash, though its cover is a reminder that even 30 years ago, an endorsement from Martin Marty ("emphatic, consistently informative, almost over-gentle") was already the nihil obstat of mainline Protestant publishing.

But Short's book has endured. (A second edition ...