The article keys in with something which I was thinking about very recently.

I confess to having a, somewhat depraved, taste for Susan Howatch's books: Glittering Images, A Question of Integrity etc. They're undemanding reading, and the ones which I like most have a spiritual, or mystical, dimension. The plot always tends to be the same: someone falls into a deep spiritual/emotional crisis from which s/he is rescued by a terribly understanding and personable Church of England clergyman. Then often, in the next book in the series, the clergyman who has done the rescuing falls into a spiritual/emotional crisis from which he is rescued…. (Yes, honestly – believe it or not, the books really do make quite good reading, even for atheists. But I suggest that, as a matter of principle, atheists should only buy second hand copies in charity shops.)

I'm now waiting for Susan Howatch to write the book in which the villain is the madly attractive occupant of a Chair in the Public Understanding of Science who lures impressionable women (and men) to their doom. Or perhaps the person having the spiritual crisis might be the madly attractive occupant of the Chair, and who comes to understand by page 400 that (in a deeply spiritual sense, naturally) there's something to be said for Creationism…