{"id":63,"date":"2008-08-06T07:57:23","date_gmt":"2008-08-06T07:57:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/pontifications\/2008\/08\/flash-dan-brown-starts-his-own.html"},"modified":"2008-08-06T07:57:23","modified_gmt":"2008-08-06T07:57:23","slug":"flash-dan-brown-starts-his-own","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/2008\/08\/flash-dan-brown-starts-his-own.html","title":{"rendered":"FLASH! Dan Brown starts his own church!"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Faux<\/span>Evidently tired of dragging down the Catholic Church, blockbuster novelist Dan Brown has apparently decided to found his own religion–and yet it looks an awful lot like the one he has accused of everything that has ever gone wrong in the History of the World!
\nHey, if you can’t beat ’em…So will Ron Howard be pope? Or Tom Hanks? I’d vote for the latter, now that they’ve apparently tamed some of that silly mane from the first Dan Brown-Ron Howard thriller, “The Da Vinci Code.” For the sequel, “Angels & Demons,” the producers couldn’t get permission to film in the Vatican–shocked? Here’s the Telegraph’s take:<\/a> “The original book by Dan Brown so infuriated the Catholic Church that the Vatican banned director Ron Howard from filming there.” Well, no one gets permission to film in the Vatican. Ever. But really, would you let them in?
\n\"Faux<\/span>So, in keeping with the best Hollywood traditions, the producers are re-constructing St. Peter’s Square in Sony’s Southern California studio. (Someplace, novelist and Catholic convert Walker Percy said that in the modern world, the religious choice is between Rome and California. I need to find that citation. In any case, now no one need choose…)
\nI registered my doubts about the novel<\/a> earlier, but I must say that from what I can tell, the sets look pretty remarkable. Except where is the scaffolding that’s always on every Roman monument that you really want to see?
\n\"Faux<\/span> The Church of Dan apparently does have a saint already: “During shooting in Rome earlier this year, Hanks won widespread admiration when he halted filming to escort a passing bride to her wedding at the Pantheon.”
\nH\/T: RNS blog<\/a>.
\nPhotos CARRILLO\/PACIFICCOASTNEWS.COM via The Telegraph<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Evidently tired of dragging down the Catholic Church, blockbuster novelist Dan Brown has apparently decided to found his own religion–and yet it looks an awful lot like the one he has accused of everything that has ever gone wrong in the History of the World! Hey, if you can’t beat ’em…So will Ron Howard be…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,6,7,4,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-catholic","category-church","category-history","category-pop-culture","category-pope"],"yoast_head":"\nFLASH! 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He came by all those vocations by accident, or Providence, during a longer-than-expected sojourn in Rome in the 1980s. Gibson began his journalistic career as a walk-on sports editor and columnist at The International Courier, a small daily in Rome serving Italy's English-language community. He then found a job as a newscaster and writer across the Tiber at the English Programme at Vatican Radio, an entity he describes as a cross between NPR and Armed Forces Radio for the pope. The Jesuits who ran the radio were charitable enough to hire Gibson even though he had no radio background, could not pronounce the name \"Karol Wojtyla,\" and wasn't Catholic. Time and experience overcame all those challenges, and Gibson went on to cover dozens of John Paul II's overseas trips, including papal visits to Africa, Europe, Latin America and the United States. When Gibson returned to the United States in 1990 he returned to print journalism to cover the religion beat in his native New Jersey for two dailies. He worked first for The Record of Hackensack, and then for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey, winning the nation's top awards in religion writing at both places. In 1999 he won the Supple Religion Writer of the Year contest, and in 2000 he was chosen as the Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year. Gibson is a longtime board member of the Religion Newswriters Association and he is a contributor to ReligionLink, a service of the Religion Newswriters Foundation. Since 2003, David Gibson has been an independent writer specializing in Catholicism, religion in contemporary America, and early Christian history. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Boston Magazine, Commonweal, America, The New York Observer, Beliefnet and Religion News Service. He has produced documentaries on early Christianity for CNN and other networks and has traveled on assignment to dozens of countries, with an emphasis on reporting from Europe and the Middle East. He is a frequent television commentator and has appeared on the major cable and broadcast networks. He is also a regular speaker at conferences and seminars on Catholicism, religion in America, and journalism. Gibson's first book, The Coming Catholic Church: How the Faithful are Shaping a New American Catholicism (HarperSanFrancisco), was published in 2003 and deals with the church-wide crisis revealed by the clergy sexual abuse crisis. The book was widely hailed as a \"powerful\" and \"first-rate\" treatment of the crisis from \"an academically informed journalist of the highest caliber.\" His second book, The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World (HarperSanFrancisco), came out in 2006 and is the first full-scale treatment of the Ratzinger papacy--how it happened, who he is, and what it means for the Catholic Church. The Rule of Benedict has been praised as \"an exceptionally interesting and illuminating book\" from \"a master storyeller.\" Born and raised in New Jersey, David Gibson studied European history at Furman University in South Carolina and spent a year working on Capitol Hill before moving to Italy. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter and is working on a book about conversion, and on several film and television projects.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/author\/dgibson"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/pontifications\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}