With all due respect to F. Scott Fitzgerald and Garrison Keillor, the Twin Cities’ most notable literary export is probably Charles M. Schulz, the creator of the beloved comic strip Peanuts. Hundreds of millions of readers have delighted in the almost 18,000 strips, created over the course of almost fifty years—not to mention the many animated television specials, movies, amusement parks, and marketing ephemera. And it doesn’t take much familiarity with Peanuts to recognize that Christianity informed it to a degree unusual for newspaper comics. Our guest today on Christian Humanist Profiles, Stephen J. Lind, has written a book that chronicles Schulz’s complicated relationship with faith. That book, A Charlie Brown Religion: Exploring the Spiritual Life and Work of Charles M. Schulz, is out now from the University Press of Mississippi
You’re in Love, Charlie Brown is a great “minor” Peanuts special.