I like reading the Washington Post. It contains some of the finest writing in the land. But it's relentlessly secularist. Though it tries to cover it up, once in awhile, you come across something like this review of a novel based on the life of St. Paul. You then know what you're dealing with at the Post. The candor is almost jaw-dropping. Excerpts:
Ambition, indeed, is at the core of [novelist James] Cannon's Paul, who goes from being an ardent Hellenist to a hard-line Pharisee to a full-fledged Christian convert with hardly so much as a backward glance. No one could accuse Cannon of whitewashing his subject, who comes across here as every bit as arrogant and pigheaded as his own letters suggest he was. Yet the end effect is to make it hard to swallow Paul as the chosen man of God Cannon clearly intends him to be. . .
Somehow, the spirit is missing here. Paul's conversion is an event that should haunt the rest of the book -- it is not every day, after all, that you meet the Son of God on the road. Instead, within a couple of pages Paul is as insufferable as a born-again Christian as he was as a born-again Jew, flaunting his God-given authority to try to wrest control of the Christian movement from the incompetents and schemers to whom Jesus was foolish enough to entrust his legacy.
