May have to read ...

...the Da Vinci Code. Looks like it's so popular and contains so many fictions about Christian faith etc that it may be necessary to know what they are before they start being accepted as fact and cropping up in conversations about spirituality, faith etc. Unfortunate fact is that people seem ready to believe all sorts of stuff about the Christian faith "True origins" which are harder to square with the evidence than the actual claims. We are really swimming against the tide in terms of popular perceptions when people find fictions more believeable than the realities. It isn't that people are more skeptical in general, no [as GK Chesterton pointed out so many years ago]: it's that having abandoned the Christian faith they [in general] are ready to believe anything but.

Our most urgent missionary task in this culture is to recover plausibility and that will mean paying attention to what gains respect and a sense of plausibility in popular culture with regard to the spirtual dimensions of life. The New Age movements are perhaps a helpful indicator of which way the wind [or Wind?] is blowing.