Evangelical media has been abuzz with the story of Elizabeth Ashley Smith, the hostage of the Atlanta courthouse killer who convinced her captor to give himself up by reading to him from Rick Warren’s best-selling spiritual self-help manual, The Purpose Driven Life. Now the story is jumping to the secular press. The NYT’s headline, “Hostage’s Past May Have Helped Win Captor’s Trust,” alludes to the fact that Smith’s account is unconfirmed, but the article, by Shaila DeWan and Laurie Goodstein, could have been written by Pat Robertson. Or Dostoyevsky: This detail — “When they returned to her apartment, Ms. Smith made pancakes and spoke about God.” — reminds us of the end of The Brothers Karamozov, in which the Christ-like Alyosha leads a pack of boys away from a funeral to feast on pancakes, everyone clapping hands and proclaiming eternal brotherhood.