The God Tube Uncovering the Hidden Spiritual Message in Pop Culture

by Lawler, James

• ISBN13: 9780812696486
• ISBN10: 0812696484
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2010-12-28
• Publisher: Open Court

Summary

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.

Author Biography

James Lawler is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of The Existentialist Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre (1976) and Matter and Spirit: The Battle of Metaphysics in Modern Western Philosophy before Kant (2006).

Table of Contents

Introduction	p. vii
Between Duty and Desire: Morality in The Simpsons	p. 1
From Illusion to Reality: The Matrix of the Good Society	p. 26
The Multidimensional Universe of Buffy the Vampire Slayer	p. 60
Blinding the Eyes of Justice: Woody Allen's Tale of Crime and Punishment	p. 87
Realizing the Highest Good: The Power of Love in the Matrix Trilogy	p. 117
Dialectics of the Force in Star Wars	p. 141
Turning to the Dark Side: The Problem of Evil in Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Darth Vader	p. 162
Faith with Reason: Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ	p. 190
The Real Secret of The Da Vinci Code	p. 216
The Platonic Wisdom of the Gospel of Mary Magdalene	p. 258
Epilogue	p. 287
Index	p. 289
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