The first thing to be said about this book is that the title is great. So I’d recommend getting a different edition from this one. One point: this particular edition has some really bad formatting issues where the text sometimes doesn’t quite match the cartoons, and in one case cuts off the last few lines of the chapter completely. And even if you don’t buy the book’s premise, you get a lot of classic Peanuts strips for yr money. As a thought experiment it’s very interesting. However, Short’s prose is a little difficult to keep up with at times, and overall I think he’s more convincing when he’s arguing that art (even comics) is a great way to convey truth indirectly to a given audience rather than arguing that Christianity and comedy have a lot in common. The Peanuts/Christianity link isn’t that big a stretch – Charles Schulz was a devout Christian whose faith played a key part in the strip’s overall theme, although never really to the point of hitting people over the head with it – so it’s not a case of Short trying to read too much into it. Which is just as well, as the actual text – in which Robert Short explores how the Peanuts strips reflect key themes in the Gospels – would have been over my head. I remember checking this out of the library when I was a kid, but I mainly just read the comics. Amazingly, this book still sells over fifty years later. As theology, it's something people will read who want to read it, and they can expect a solid work. The Peanuts panels that illustrate this work are fun, and well chosen.
Paul and the synoptic gospels as much as you'll read about Lucy, Linus and Schroeder. Short calls "the hound of heaven." But remember this is a work of theology, so you'll see references to Karl Barth, St. Charlie Brown, classic misfit, is the "star" of the book, but you'll see other characters dealt with, even Snoopy, whom author Robert L. Instead, it's a fairly conservative work that uses the existential and moral crises of the various Peanuts characters to illustrate how their "grief," good or not, was foreshadowed in the bible. It is not an indictment of the current church like RESIDENT ALIENS, or a work of pop sociology like THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE SIMPSONS. THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO PEANUTS is, as the title implies, a work of theology from a Christian, specifically New Testament, perspective. At the height of Peanuts-mania, in 1965, this unusual but highly successful book appeared.
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