Mystical Realism

The NYT delivers news of The Shack, a gi-normous bestseller of a Christian novel, to the secular world, comparing its sales to Eckhart Tolle’s new age blockbuster, A New Earth. But the paper misses the more interesting connection between Tolle’s self-help Bible and author William Young’s therapeutic parable: Tolle is closer to the popular evangelicalism of Joel Osteen than his secular fans realize; and Young seems to be closer to the pulp mysticism of new age classics such as Carlos Castenada’s Separate Reality than the Times, filing The Shack under “Christian,” can imagine.