Hello and welcome to Focus. The Catholic Cancer's podcast for living, understanding and defending

your Catholic faith. One of the greats on the show today, when you get a chance to talk with

Mike Aquilini, you should take that chance and we're delighted that he is here with us. The author

of just dozens and dozens of books and I'm quite serious, dozens and dozens of books. Also,

the executive vice president of the St. Paul Center and a renowned speaker and you know,

Mike Aquilini has been around for a long time. He's got a new book called Africa in the early

church. The almost forgotten roots of Catholic Christianity and it's amazing how many of us

in our defense of the Catholic church and our desire to share the Catholic church. We don't know

the story of African Christianity. So a very welcome addition to the literature that you might

read to prepare yourself to be a defender and shareer of the Catholic faith. Mike Aquilini,

thanks so much for being here with us. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm honored, Si.

Really a beautiful book. You start right off with a little comment about race because to the

ancient person, you cannot talk about Africa today without it involving all kinds of racial

implications and history and all that, but the ancient person did not think about Africa in racial

terms. Yeah, we don't we don't find any evidence of that. We see that that that ancient people's

like all people are aware of human differences like skin color, but they didn't they didn't think

of that as a reason for thinking more or less of a person. It's it's just something they knew

noted in passing. Africa was an important part of the ancient world, the world in which Christianity

first emerged. The world our savior came to redeem and and and it was just another part of that

world, but it became an important part in the history of emerging Christianity. There's kind of

three parts to that world, the way that the ancient person thought of it. The Mediterranean as

you point out in the book, the kind of center of the earth with Africa and Asia and Europe

...