It’s…warm.

I haven’t experienced "warm" in months. "Warm" as in "wear shorts."

And to think, I used to live in this kind of weather. And shake my head in pity at the weather reports of freezintg weather up North in April. Shame on me!

This morning, I spoke to a group of mostly seniors at Cardinal Newman High School here in Columbia. They’d read De-Coding Da Vinci, which made this talk highly unusual in that I couldn’t exactly stand up there and rehash the points from my book, since..they’d read it. So, what I did was talk a bit about being a writer, dwelling on points that might relate to their point in life: be bold in trying to achieve what you want, don’t live in fear of rejection, you have nothing to lose in trying and asking and putting forth yourself and your skills. Talked about process of writing, how this book came about, and then settled on some foundational issues, primarily – why does this matter? What is the temptation of the DVC version of Jesus  – which is just the usual, spineless Jesus that so many of us are drawn to, rather than the Jesus of the Gospels who tells us to pick up our cross, love our enemies and feed the hungry.  What are the fundamental falsehoods of DVC? – that truth is a crapshoot, that the best we can do is pick the version that pleases us the most, and that the Jesus of the Gospels and the Church has nothing meaningful to say.

Afterwards, we gathered in the library for lunch and more questions, not only from the students, but some of the very fine faculty and parents who’d gathered as well.

By the way, do you know what the most frequently asked question is regarding this? I’m asked it every time, in every venue: "Do you think Dan Brown really believes this stuff?"

Isn’t that interesting  – basically, people are wondering if he’s abysmally stupid or just really smart, as in "this will make me a lot of money" smart.

And what do I say? Well, I don’t know, but all we can say is that his interviews – especially early ones – indicate that he believed he was doing humanity a great service by bringing this "hidden history" to light. Of course, that could also be PR as well…