Natural High

Call him a doctor, pseudo-intellectual educator, philosopher, snake oil salesman or a PC (per his recent Microsoft commercial); Deepak Chopra is nothing if not courageous. His more than thirty vaguely neo-spiritualist books on medicine, religion and physics have gradually set him at odds with established doctors, priests and scientists of all stripes (he supports intelligent design!). Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment is his latest work, a more-or-less fictionalized account of Jesus’ “lost years” omitted from the New Testament . It probably won’t score any points from a community still suffering at the hands of Da Vinci decoder hobbyists but that’s not the point: Chopra speaks and writes with such conviction that regardless of how dubious and doubtful his arguments are, there’s no way you can doubt he’s speaking his mind— a beacon of sincerity in an ironic age.
Sun., Nov. 23, 7 p.m., 2008