A copy of my book The Grail Code is in my hands and so, I suppose, in the hands of Amazon and other booksellers as well. I hope you’ll have it in your kind hands before too long.

What does the Holy Grail have to do with the Church Fathers? I’m glad you asked. I’ll be blogging that over the next few days. My co-author Christopher Bailey, whom I’ve exalted in these pages before, is blogging on the Grail legends more specifically at GrailCode.com, our website.

Chris and I wanted to rescue the Grail from its captivity by the wacko fringe. In our book, we track the history of the legends, their origins, and their ends. I hope you’ll join us for the Quest.

Thanks to all of you who prayed for Gracie on the day of her first Communion. The Mass was beautiful. She was, as always, an angel. And, though the weather stations all predicted fierce thunderstorms over our picnic celebration, it could not have been a more perfect, sunny day at the park.

Sunday, April 23, is my daughter Grace Marie’s first Communion. Please remember her in your prayers.

And then go east, young patrologist. (By “young” I mean younger than, say, Polycarp at the time of his martyrdom. We readers of the Fathers keep our years well.) Christians in India are producing great studies and translations of the Fathers. What’s more, their books are affordable, even after air mail. The problem, for those of us in the States, is that Indian titles are almost impossible to track down. Most of them don’t appear on Amazon or any of the usual suspects. I found a good clearinghouse at Merging Currents. Their prices are great; the books usually arrive in less than two weeks; and the books themselves are marvelous. For example: there’s a fairly new edition of Aphrahat available in English. And I loved this study of the Syriac Fathers on the Holy Spirit. To me, all this is big news. Much of the Indian work focuses on the Syriac Fathers. The old patristic manuals often divided the Fathers into “Greek” and “Latin.” If that’s all you know, find out what you’ve been missing. (The only caveat about Merging Currents is that you have to do the sorting yourself. It’s a huge assemblage of everything religious and Indian, which makes for quite a curry.)