ODDS & ENDS.

Just three days into this millennium, Charles M. Schulz, creator of Peanuts, called it quits. His last strip, appearing January 3, 2000, reads in part, "Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Linus, Lucy... how can I ever forget them?"

We won't forget them either.

Nor can I forget the book The Gospel According to Peanuts Westminster John Knox), published in 1965. Its author, Robert L. Short, financed a lot of his extensive theological education by giving color-slide lectures on the theological implications in Peanuts. Eventually he wrote tins book, which has sold more than 10 million copies. Early editions cost $1.50; now the price is $13.95.

In this book's acknowledgments, the author writes appreciatively about his teachers at the University of Chicago's Divinity School putting up with his unusual interest. "They have met the enemy, and it is me." One of his teachers, Nathan A. Scott, Jr., writes in the foreword of the book, "Mr. Schulz has been turning a remarkably penetrating searchlight on the anxieties and evasions and duplicities that make up our common lot; and, as Mr. Short fully demonstrates in this attractive little book, the analysis of human existence that Mr. Schulz is giving us is essentially theological and, in its basic inspiration, deeply Christian."

This 127-page book begins with a chapter on "The Church and the Arts." Short writes in it, "Art, just because of its subtlety or indirectness, has a way of sneaking around `mental blocks' and getting to the heart of the matter where it is capable of deeply and literally `moving'--even the most immovable--men and women." That, in a nutshell, is what he claims Peanuts does.

The last chapter, titled "Concluding Unscientific Post script," is an allusion both to H. Richard Niebuhr's classic book Christ and Culture (HarperCollins, 1986), whose last chapter is likewise titled, and to Danish existential philosopher Soren Kierkegaard's book Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (Mercer, 1997), where this phrase originated. So Short cleverly salts his work with allusions to two theological and philosophical heavy hitters.

Not everyone sees the same theological messages embodied in Peanuts that Short does. One Amazon.com online reviewer writes, "There ain't no redemption in Peanuts. It's one of the great dark masterpieces of American fiction, and the pious ramblings of a book like this only trivialize it." This reviewer strikes me as a hard nut to crack.

Short celebrated the 25th anniversary of the publication of The Gospel According to Peanuts by writing another book, Short Meditations on the Bible and Peanuts (Westminster John Knox, 1991). In this 143-page book, illustrated by many Peanuts cartoon strips, he encourages readers to know the Bible well. He tells readers that Schulz was the first comic strip artist to use biblical quotes in his work. And he mentions that Schulz's study, just like a good minister's study, contains shelves of biblical commentaries. "The Bible and Peanuts are excellent go-togethers."

Today Short is pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Monticello, Arkansas and happy about the new edition of The Gospel According to Peanuts that has just been released. He thinks T.S. Eliot's claim that the things we read most easily have profound influences on us is one reason why Schulz's comic strip has been so important to so many people's lives.

Now all of us must learn to live without our daily nibbling of Peanuts.

Good grief.

PETER GILMOUR ([e-mail]) teaches at the Institute of Pastoral Studies of Loyola University Chicago.