(photo by Bob Daemmrich)

Random House has announced the publication of Norman Mailer’s new book of—wait for it—theology. (In an eerie echo of the Neale Donald Walsch franchise, the book is titled On God: An Uncommon Conversation). I suspect that ghostwriting for Jesus gave Mailer the sense that he was up to the task—in a publicity interview for that book he said that being a celebrity had given him “a slight understanding of what it’s like to be half a man and half something else, something larger.” But this new book, which promises a series of “Platonic dialogues” between Mailer and his literary executor, still seems a bit much.

A real theologian I know who’s seen an advance copy of the book says that Mailer’s something of a Gnostic. According to the publisher,

Mailer establishes his own system of belief, one that rejects both organized religion and atheism. He presents instead a view of our world as one created by an artistic God who often succeeds but can also fail in the face of determined opposition by contrary powers in the universe, with whom war is waged for the souls of humans.

In other words, a God who sounds a lot like Norman Mailer. Those pernicious contrary powers better find themselves a pew to pray on quick…