Da Vinci Debaters Welcome!

Sony Entertainment has set up a website called The DaVinci Challenge that will feature essays from religious experts discussing the pros and cons of the
upcoming DaVinci Code movie and/or the book. You can click the title link to check it out-I read about it in the NY Times this morning(which has a broken link to the website in the online article)and decided to see what essays were already up and to read them for myself.


Since I didn't read DVC or any of Dan Brown's books(he's become one of those writers that are so popular that I have no desire to even try-excessive hype causes that in many folk),I figured that I'm alot like most of the target audience for the movie-you do feel sometimes that you should atleast try to know something about it for the very sake of being able to talk about with those who have read it without sounding snobby about not having read it.

So far,there are three essays posted and they all basically encourage Christians not to go the protest route and to see this as an opportunity to openly discuss faith with others and to be able to have a solid foundation to refute the novel's claims by seeing the movie or/and read the book,too. Sony says that they're not editing the content of the essays and I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. This is a smart move on their part,in my opinion,to open up the floodgates and say"Ok,let's talk about this together and maybe we can agree to disagree."

As for me,the closest I'm getting to this whole thing is reading The Secret Supper by Javier Sierra(which is due out in March from Simon & Schuster),a novel that focues on DaVinci's painting of the Last Supper and the coded message hidden within. At first,I thought it would be another book to jump on the Dan Brown bandwagon but it's a story that stands on it's own quite nicely. For one thing,unlike DVC,Secret Supper is a historical novel that takes place in Italy during the year 1497. A mysterious death leads a Dominican inquistor,Father Augustine,to investigate Leonardo's work in progress to discover what it has to do with a possible conspiracy to undermine the influence of the Catholic Church. I'll have a more complete review when I finish the book but I can say that Secret Supper is a pretty engrossing read with shades of Number of the Rose(but much easier to get into)and if the DVC fanfare helps to put some more good books on the shelves,so much the better. We can all agree that a good story is worth the telling and if we're lucky,worth the price of admission and popcorn at the multiplex nearest you.