I came across my old GoodReads review of Angels and Demons recently. I wrote it in the summer of 2008, and reading it now, I barely recognize the guy who wrote it. Not because the opinions are wrong, but because the review contains nothing. Plot summary, a few complaints about the ending, and a rating. It tells you nothing about why I was reading that book, or what that summer was like.
That summer, I was coaching baseball and going to church. Neither was something I would have predicted for myself.
The baseball part had a natural explanation. My son Ted was playing, and I'm the kind of dad who can't just watch. I'd just taken over as president of Crescenta Valley Little League, which meant fielding long, accusatory emails about whether a ten-year-old played three innings or four. If you've spent any time around youth baseball, you know the drill. The kids are having a blast. The adults are treating a recreational game like Game 7 of the World Series. I was spending so much time managing the adult chaos that I didn't always stop to appreciate what I was actually watching: Ted developing into a real player, game by game, summer by summer. I was keeping score in the wrong column.
The church part was harder to explain.
My parents raised me in the Catholic tradition, though not the daily Mass, every Sunday kind. We went when we went. I never had the full sacramental program run on me, but the Church was still part of the scenery growing up: the liturgy, the ceremony, the sense that something old and serious was happening at the altar. I absorbed more of it than I realized. I just never had a tight grip on any of it, so there wasn't much to walk away from.
What drew me in that summer wasn't a crisis of faith. It was a pastor named Dave Roberts at Montrose Church, just down the road. My kids were in youth groups on Sunday mornings, and rather than sit in the parking lot for an hour, I'd started going to the services. Roberts had been there since 1988. What he'd built was something I didn't expect: the congregation was filled with families I knew from the kids' school, Boy Scouts, and Little League. His sermons weren't just scripture. They were history lessons. What was happening in the Roman Empire when Paul was writing his letters. What the political situation in Jerusalem meant for the people reading the Gospels. He preached context. He made the ancient text feel like a living document.
I found myself looking forward to Sundays in a way I hadn't since I was a kid.
So that's where I was that Fourth of July weekend: spirituality stirred back to something approaching consciousness, history on my mind, managing an All-Star baseball tournament in hundred-degree heat, and refereeing adult nonsense. That's when I picked up Dan Brown's Angels and Demons.
I'd been told it was similar to The Da Vinci Code, which I hadn't read yet. What I hadn't been told was how directly it would walk into the question I'd been quietly turning over for months.
The premise: someone murders a physicist-priest at CERN named Leonardo Vetra. He and his daughter, Vittoria, also a scientist, had been creating antimatter and simulating the conditions of the Big Bang. Vetra's purpose wasn't ambition. He believed that if he could reproduce the moment of creation, he could offer physical evidence of God's existence. Science, in his view, wasn't the enemy of faith. It was a road that led to the same place.
Robert Langdon gets called in, and what follows is a frantic race through Rome and Vatican City chasing a stolen antimatter canister and a string of ritualistic murders tied to the ancient Illuminati. Brown does plot mechanics the way a good pitcher throws heat: fast, relentless, hard to put down. The first 450 pages are genuinely fun. What makes them work isn't just the pacing. It's history. Brown wraps his story around the Illuminati, the Vatican, and Bernini's Rome. He uses historical context the way Roberts used it in his sermons: not as decoration but as what makes the story matter. A different kind of pulpit, but the same instinct.
The last 50 pages are another matter. The story collapses under its own contrivances, wrapping up loose ends in a rush of melodrama that Brown's editors should have sent back for a rewrite. There's also a plot hole that drove me a little crazy. In a world where you can triangulate the signal from a wireless video camera, the canister's location shouldn't be much of a mystery. But I'm a science fiction reader by habit, so suspending disbelief is a professional skill. The weak ending doesn't ruin what came before. It just means the book fell short of what it could have been.
But I kept coming back to Vetra's idea. The scientist-priest who believed the same truth could be approached from two directions.
Growing up around the Catholic tradition, even loosely, the relationship between science and faith carried a particular weight. The Church has a complicated history there. Galileo is the most obvious example, though far from the only one. The faith I grew up around asks for trust in things unseen and unprovable. That's not incompatible with how science works at its edges, but the two don't always sit comfortably together. Roberts had been quietly suggesting something else: that the tension between faith and evidence isn't a contradiction to resolve, but a conversation to keep going. He'd probably like Vetra.
Vetra, a fictional creation in a thriller built around secret societies and ticking antimatter bombs, was trying to hold that conversation. He just blew up in the middle of it.
I'm not sure that was an accident on Brown's part, though he isn't the most theologically subtle writer around. What he understood, well enough to keep me up past midnight on a holiday weekend, is that the God question doesn't go away. It keeps showing up where you don't expect it. In a church parking lot in Montrose. In a book you grab on a whim. In the middle of a baseball season.
That last one lands differently now. Ted's junior year of college baseball just ended with an injury. I've been here before. Back in 2009, I watched a line drive catch him in the knee during the championship game at the Babe Ruth Regional tournament up in Eureka. We drove home the long way that trip, through the redwoods, and I remember standing among those trees thinking that they'd been growing since before baseball was invented and would be standing long after both of us were gone. The game shrinks to its proper size in a redwood forest. It didn't make the loss hurt less. It just put it somewhere you could carry it.
I've been thinking about the summer of 2008 more than usual these past few weeks. The Little League all-stars run. The car rides home. I was so busy managing adult egos that summer that I didn't always appreciate what I was watching. Five years later, I'd be standing in a high school stadium watching him launch a three-run homer in the seventh inning to win a Pacific League title. I didn't know any of that was coming. You never do. You don't ask the God question about the small things until the small things are gone.
Ted's got one more year. I don't know how it ends. But the Cubs look like they might be real contenders this year, which is its own kind of theology. And I keep coming back to Brown and Roberts, two people who share nothing except the instinct to use history to make the present feel like it matters. That's not a small thing when you're sitting in the spring of 2016 trying to figure out what you believe, and why, and what all of it was for.
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Angels & Demons is an effective and engaging page-turner that introduces Harvard professor Robert Langdon as he races through Rome and Vatican City to prevent a catastrophe involving stolen antimatter, Illuminati murders, and ancient secret societies. The story takes a while to find its footing, with the first 50 or so pages being heavy on exposition, but once it picks up speed the intricate and fast-paced plot makes it nearly impossible to put down. The novel isn't deep literature, but it succeeds as a fun and easy read. The ending stumbles, but see the full review for details.
