Bob Lesnevsky made this table. We had to bring it up in chunks. We're in little.

Very nice. Yeah, but thank you for being on the show with me.

Well, thank you for having me. I am honored. Is it right that you've written 800 books?

No, I have not written 800 books.

70, though, 70 plus books? Yeah, I'm right around there.

How do you keep up? I'm highly motivated. You know, I have six

children. Now I have six grandchildren, you know, so there are a lot of things that you want to do and

things take money, you know, so you have to write books. Well, fair enough. And it's the only thing I

know how to do. What's the first book you wrote? The first book I wrote that was solid book. Yeah. Is the

Fathers of the Church. Oh, interesting. And this remains a love of yours because you've written a recent

book on that, haven't you? Oh, I've written most of my books on the Fathers of the Church.

And that was the big surprise, you know, because what happened was I was doing a lot of

incidental journalism. I was editing the Diocesan newspaper in Pittsburgh, and I was writing for our Sunday visitor newspaper and a number of publications, periodicals. And so the publisher of our Sunday visitor books saw my voice and he said, I want you to write a book on the fathers of the church because

there's no popular introduction to them out there. And I thought, that book will sell about four

copies, right? But let's do it. Right. Well, I mean, he was willing to pay me in advance. So,

so that's, that's a good thing. When you're a freelancer, and as I was at the time, that's a very good thing. It's money all up front. So I wrote the book and it surprised all of us.

What was it cool? The Fathers of the Church and an introduction to the first Christian teachers. And it ended up being a textbook. You used as a textbook at the university level. So it took on a life

that we did not predict because I wrote the book to be on the level of my son, who at the time,

I believe, was in sixth or seventh grade. He's a smart kid. I was going to say, maybe you've got

really bright kids. He's a smart kid, but, but, you know, I put it out there.

And so one day, my phone rings, and it's a professor of patristics.

And he says, I want you to do a new edition of your book.

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