{"id":7265,"date":"2004-05-19T09:00:45","date_gmt":"2004-05-19T09:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/nice_review.html"},"modified":"2004-05-19T09:00:45","modified_gmt":"2004-05-19T09:00:45","slug":"nice_review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/nice_review.html","title":{"rendered":"Nice Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

From Mark Gauvreau Judge at Breakpoint<\/a><\/p>\n

Amy Welborn\u2019s De-Coding Da-Vinci is a strong effort. Where Kellmeyer is sometimes glib, Welborn is sober, reasonable (although like Kellmeyer, she does claim that Da Vinci is \u201cmore than a novel.\u201d) She wastes no time getting to the core of what fuels the Da Vinci phenomenon \u2013 Gnosticism. The ancient heretical movement, an offshoot of Christianity, had a few consistent themes: the source of goodness is the spiritual; the material and corporeal world is evil; humanity is messed up because we don\u2019t realize that the \u201cspark\u201d of the divine is not outside but within us; salvation is attained by acquiring secret knowledge (gnosis means knowledge); only a select few are worthy of having this knowledge.<\/p>\n

This is the nub of the entire thing, and the reason for its popularity. Dan Brown has not uncovered some baroque conspiracy that will inaugurate a brand new theology; he has reintroduced a very old heresy. To his credit, he has introduced it at the very time and place where it would be most celebrated: the narcissistic, unbelieving twenty-first century West. Gnosticism, after all, is the official religion of Hollywood.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Mark Gauvreau Judge at Breakpoint Amy Welborn\u2019s De-Coding Da-Vinci is a strong effort. Where Kellmeyer is sometimes glib, Welborn is sober, reasonable (although like Kellmeyer, she does claim that Da Vinci is \u201cmore than a novel.\u201d) She wastes no time getting to the core of what fuels the Da Vinci phenomenon \u2013 Gnosticism. The…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nNice Review - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2004\/05\/nice_review.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Nice Review - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"From Mark Gauvreau Judge at Breakpoint Amy Welborn\u2019s De-Coding Da-Vinci is a strong effort. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7265\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}