where are we going

I fell into the trap the other day and read 'the shack'. I read the 'davinci code' for the same reasons. it was popular and i just had to know what was going on- what was making people talk so much, what was driving them back to reading and away from television screens. I read the 'code' in a couple of days and read 'the shack' in a night. the only similarity between the two books was the ravenous appetite that was built up for the two books. the differences are a mile long, especially when you take into account the marketing machine behind teh two. one had a major motion picture studio, celebrity author, celebrity actor(is there another kind), money, money,money. The other published the book out of their garage and marketed the book through word of mouth. This is not twitter and facebook word of mouth either although that did pick up and yes Oprah picked it up to. I have to admit that there has only been two books promoted by Oprah that have crossed my desk. I was tricked into reading the Lovely Bones and then of course - the shack.

i am for obvious reasosn skirting over the religious questions that are posed and semi posed in the books. it strikes me that we in north america are in the midst of religious crises. North of the US border churches are for sale and south of the border it appears politics is in political crises . I do not know enough about the situation in the US but certainly up here every 5th church is for sale, attendence is down and money is very short. I wonder how much of an appetite we have for more religious paraphenilia writing.