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The movie treatment of his novel, 'Angels and Demons,' is cleaning up at the box office this week. The sequel to 'The Da Vinci Code,' due out in November, might buoy the publishing industry through the recession. And if you want to understand the state of American religion, you need to understand why so many people love Dan Brown. It isn't just that he knows how to keep the pages turning. That's what it takes to sell a million novels. But if you want to sell 100 million, you need to preach as well as entertain — to present a...

ROME -- The buffer zone can be wafer thin in this Eternal City between two warring parties, the Vatican and (to use Hollywood-speak) "the people who brought you The Da Vinci Code." ----- [snip] ----- In Angels & Demons -- which opens Friday in theatres nationwide -- Hanks once again plays symbologist Robert Langdon, who's once again solving a secret-society mystery that strikes to the core of the Roman Catholic church. A sample of anti-matter from the CERN physics lab in Switzerland has been smuggled into the Vatican, and an assassin has promised to kill each of the four cardinals...

Ron Howard has been doing his best Opie impression while running around claiming that his upcoming movie, “Angels & Demons,” is not anti-Christian or anti-Catholic. Howard is in denial and perhaps a bit distracted by the box-office. In the film, the Catholic Church and the Vatican are depicted as secretive, conspiratorial, ignorant, and violent.

Ron Howard, director of “Angels & Demons,” the movie version of Dan Brown’s book by that name, attacked Catholic League president Bill Donohue yesterday on the Huffington Post. Referring to a booklet on the movie that Donohue authored, “Angels & Demons: More Demonic than Angelic,” (click here) Howard wrote: “Mr. Donohue’s booklet accuses us of lying when our movie trailer says the Catholic Church ordered a brutal massacre to silence the Illuminati centuries ago. It would be a lie if we had ever suggested our movie is anything other than a work of fiction….” Howard also said that “most in...

It was described as a “phantasmagorical cocktail of inventions”, a “masonic plot” and a “pot pourri of lies”. Now a nervous Vatican is braced for the sequel to The Da Vinci Code and the return of its nemesis, Dan Brown. Angels & Demonsis the latest Brown thriller to be turned into a film, and already the Catholic Church is agonising over how best to respond: to urge the faithful to boycott the film, or to ignore it? The Vatican and the Italian Catholic Church condemned The Da Vinci Codein its book and film version, but some church officials argued that...

VATICAN CITY — Were the makers of Angels and Demons, a movie based on a Dan Brown novel by the same name, seriously hoping to film scenes on the premises of Catholic churches in Rome? If so, they must have been dreaming.The movie, which is a prequel to Brown’s more commercially successful potboiler, The Da Vinci Code, sees Tom Hanks reprise his role as Harvard professor Robert Langdon. This time, however, instead of battling a murderous “Opus Dei monk,” Langdon is on a mission to save the Vatican from being blown up by a canister of antimatter. The storyline also...

CNN, following in the footsteps of ABCNews.com’s overblown take on the subject, couldn’t help but to insert snotty language into its report on the Catholic Diocese of Rome’s denial to the filming of the movie adaptation of Dan Brown’s "Angels and Demons." CNN international correspondent Jennifer Eccleston, closing her report on Thursday’s "American Morning," labeled the Church’s refusal, based on "The Da Vinci Code" book and movie’s bashing of the Catholic faith, "a big problem in Rome, where some sins are just too grave to be forgiven -- even if they're for art's sake." "Sins" that are "just too grave...

A movie adaptation of Dan Brown’s book, Angels and Demons, is now in production; it is the prequel to the film, “The Da Vinci Code.” There are reports today that the Vatican has banned those associated with “Angels and Demons” from shooting in Catholic churches in Rome or in the Vatican itself. This is important because there are scenes in the movie that are supposed to take place in the Vatican and in two churches in Rome. “Angels and Demons” stars Tom Hanks in his role as Robert Langdon, the symbologist. This time he is trying to unravel a plot...

Lee Strobel has written a sequel to his book "The Case for Christ." The new book is "The Case for the Real Jesus." Fundamentalist atheists have been attacking Jesus with renewed vigor, but as usual their claims don't stand up to even simple investigation. This may be Strobel’s best book yet and he successfully refutes pseudoscholars like Bart Ehrman, conspiracy theorists like Michael Baigent and hacks like Dan Brown. Their arguments so poorly stand up to scrutiny it’s almost laughable. Check it out, it has my vote for Book of rhe Year: http://www.amazon.com/Case-Real-Jesus-Journalist-Investigates/dp/031024210X/

A painter fascinated with best-selling conspiracy thriller The Da Vinci Code committed suicide after becoming convinced she was the subject of a real-life murder plot.Caroline Eldridge, 38, moved to Italy to pursue her interest in Leonardo Da Vinci, but her mind became "muddled" by the mysteries surrounding his work, her father said. Caroline Eldridge, a Da Vinci scholar and artist, who killed herself after becoming obsessed with the mysteries surrounding the artist and the best-selling novel The Da Vinci CodeShe suffered paranoid delusions that she and her family were in danger "because of the knowledge that she had" of Leonardo...

St Luke's Church has links to the Holy Grail story Treasure hunters trying to crack the Da Vinci Code are believed to be behind criminal damage at a village church with links to the Holy Grail. Chisels and hammers were used to chip away at walls inside St Luke's church in Hodnet, Shropshire. The church has attracted many visitors including tourists from overseas after its links to the Holy Grail were featured in a book and website. The Reverend Charmian Beech said: "They seemed to know what they were doing." A number of holes were chiselled into the stonework...

The Holy See has warned that there will be “serious consequences” for a rebel African archbishop if reports that he is to work with the author of the Da Vinci Code on a new novel about exorcisms are true. Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo, the unpredictable African faith healer and exorcist, is reported to have agreed to work with Dan Brown on the project. The agreement was said to have been reached at a meeting in Houston, Texas, attended by representatives of Dan Brown, Sony Pictures, Random House publishing company and Target, an American company which intends to finance the film. Participants...

          > ALL TIME BOX OFFICE         WORLDWIDE GROSSES #1-100 - #101-200 - #201-300 - #301-302(in millions) Rank Title Studio Worldwide Domestic / % Overseas / % Year 21 The Da Vinci Code Sony $750.0 $217.3 29.0% $532.7 71.0% 2006 22 The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe BV $744.8 $291.7 39.2% $453.1 60.8% 2005

Interview With Monsignor Raffaello Martinelli ROME, JUNE 9, 2006 (Zenit.org).- New methods are needed to catechize believers in the truths of the Eucharist, says Monsignor Raffaello Martinelli. The monsignor, an official of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and member of the editorial commission of the Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, is author of "L'Eucaristia, dono incomparabile di Dio agli uomini" (The Eucharist, Incomparable Gift of God to People), published by Ediciones San Clemente. In this interview with ZENIT, Monsignor Martinelli explains how he has worked to meet an increasing need for catechesis. Q: What...

IN A paddy-lined valley in the far north of Japan is a municipal signpost inscribed: “Tomb of Christ: next left.” Follow the winding path up into the forest and there, sure enough, is a simple mound with a large wooden cross labelled as the grave of Jesus. Nearby is a tomb commemorating Isukiri, Christ’s brother, adorned with a plastic poinsettia Christmas wreath. For two millennia the farming village of Shingo claims to have protected a tradition that Jesus spent most of his life in Japan. The village is the home of Sajiro Sawaguchi, a man in his eighties who claims...

The Awfulness of The Da Vinci Codehttp://www.americanheritage.com/entertainment/articles/web/20060519-movies-da-vinci-code-catholic-dan-brown-religion-tom-hanks.shtml http://tinyurl.com/zsuuc Posted Friday May 19, 2006 12:30 PM EDT In art as in life there is nothing so powerful as a bad idea whose time has come. Every decade or so a craze comes out of nowhere that inexplicably grabs hold of a portion of the public’s imagination, whips it into a frenzy, and then dissipates, leaving future generations wondering what the fuss was all about. The first such craze of the twenty-first century is, as you can’t have avoided hearing, a silly novel by a writer named Dan Brown called The Da...

If you knew that someone was about to drive off a cliff, wouldn't you warn that person about the danger? Wouldn't that be the loving thing to do? When Jesus calls His disciples to be salt and light, he was calling for Christians to do two things: 1. Warn people about their sins. 2. Show people that the answer to their sin problem is to establish a personal relationship with Jesus Christ through faith and discipleship. The warning about sin is not to condemn people for their sins; that is something only God can do. The warning about sin is...

A telltale moment in "The Da Vinci Code" points like a cryptogram to the real secret meaning behind the novel. The hero, Robert Langdon, a Harvard professor about to publish a nonfiction book claiming Mary Magdalene is the "real" Holy Grail, and the heroine, Sophie Neveu, who is "really" a direct descendent of Jesus and his wife, Mary Magdalene, are fleeing Paris because bulldog police captain Bezu Fache mistakenly believes Langdon murdered Louvre curator Jacques Sauniere. Sauniere, it turns out, headed a secret society that for centuries has preserved documents that prove Christ was solely a mortal man, that Christianity...

Dan Brown's novel, Angels & Demons, describes an ancient cult called the Illuminati that is at work in the modern world and plotting against the Catholic Church. Based on Simon Cox's book, Illuminating Angels & Demons, this fascinating two-hour documentary explores the question of whether the Illuminati still exists. This is also a visually stunning travelogue that guides viewers through the ancient streets and artwork of Rome in its quest to find the facts behind Brown's fiction

OK, people, the early reviews could have been a little better, so Dan stepped in to do some rewrites, and he and I have come up with some minor tweaks.