May

20

Dan Brown and American Religion

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Ross Douthat, a columnist for the New York Times, serves up a fine article: Dan Brown’s America. Brown is, of course, the best-selling author of The DaVinci Code and Angels and Demons, both of which have been made into hit movies. Douthat suggests that Brown’s success relies on — or at least is a symptom of — a shift in American public religion.

Douthat argues that American religion has devolved into vague spirituality, divorced from any sort of structure or serious doctrine. His critique of ”spiritual” or “religious” Americans is insightful, but he doesn’t let them off the hook. The New Testament does not present religion this way.1

These are Dan Brown’s kind of readers. 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. 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.

For millions of readers, Brown’s novels have helped smooth over the tension between ancient Christianity and modern American faith. But the tension endures. You can have Jesus or Dan Brown. But you can’t have both.


  1. One might argue that it doesn’t quite present Jesus in Douthat’s way either back↩

Jan

18

New Computer

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This last week I bought a new computer. Actually, I bought all the parts for a new computer and built it myself. After several months of research, I concluded that I could buy all the parts for a new machine  and assemble it myself for $800 to $1000 less than it would cost for someone else to do so.

My old computer was, well, old. I bought it just before I started college — 7 1/2 years ago. Of course, three years is a long time in computer technology, and my system was twice that old.

I’ll probably try to post some reviews of the particular components I purchased sometime in the not-too-distant future, but for now, I’ll just list what I had and what I upgraded to. My old computer was a Dell Dimension 8100 series. It had a Pentium 4 1.3 Ghz processor, 384 Mb of RDRAM, a 20 Gb hard drive, a Creative SoundBlaster Live! audio card, and a 16 Mb nVidia graphics card. It also had a DVD player and a separate CD burner — two fairly up-to-date items 7 1/2 years ago. The monitor was a 17″ Trinitron CRT, and I have a set of speakers from Altec Lansing. It was getting slow. Even the Internet was rough, since there is a lot of RAM-intensive content out there now.

My new computer has the following components:

I’ve kept the same speakers, at least for now. The motherboard’s onboard audio is very nice, but it takes advantage of some newer technology than my speakers are designed for (optical digital output), so the configuration is a little funny at the moment. It’s working well enough though.

Assembling the components wasn’t as hard as I thought it might be. I’d never done a whole computer before, so things like the processor made me a bit nervous. It seems to have worked out all right though. I suspect that if I did it every day, I’d be much faster, since I’d be able to anticipate potential problems (e.g. the graphics card is so big that you can’t fit the hard drive in around it, and the SATA cables are hard to get to). The instruction manuals were of varying usefulness. The case’s instructions were pointless. The motherboard manual was OK, but the processor’s was terrible. The graphics card was pretty good, but it’s also really easy to install.

I also have dual booted Windows XP Professional (32-bit) and Windows 7 Beta (64-bit). I will certainly plan to review Win 7 sometime fairly soon. For now, I don’t think it is handling the motherboard very well, but that may be because the MB manufacturer has a fairly lightweight BIOS that Win 7 doesn’t know how to use.

So far I’ve really emjoyed being able to multitask on the new machine. I’ve had it only a few days, but it is amazing how much faster everything runs and how well it allows me to multitask. I suppose that’s to be expected, but it made me think about how incredible the rate of change in technology really is. 75 years ago, a calculating machine with this many switches (then they would have been vacuum tubes) would have required a small warehouse to enclose. Now, I have a chip that will fit in the palm of my hand that holds over 780 million transistors.

Pictures of before and after. Please ignore the mess and forgive the poor image quality. It was kind of dark.

Aug

20

Hurray for VT Grad School!

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Big answer to prayer for the day:

VT is going to give me in-state tuition rates! My school bill well be about half as much as before–still plenty for only one class.