Milt Walters is drawn to France and the mythic search for the Holy Grail. However, when a boy is found murdered, the ramifications will haunt Milt for decades to come. The release of 1983s Holy Blood, Holy Grail also triggered the release of Milt Walters imagination. Along with his fifteen-year-old daughter, the mystery author travelled to the charismatic Rennes region in the French Pyrenees to learn more about the biblical legend. Once there, he came upon ghostly tales of Mary Magdalene, the Dark Madonna, and the descendants of Jesus Christ. Shortly before their visit, a young boy is found murdereda youth who carried an almost ethereal innocence about him. Milt is drawn into the regional mysticism and soon finds himself penning an out-of-character, factually-based mystery novel, entitled Deepest France. Two decades later, the young boys murder remains unsolved, and Milt is drawn again to the haunting Rennes region of France. This time, the land is different; Milt is different. He is fixated on the boys murder and how it relates to French legends of the Grail. How does any of it relate to a fast-moving, modern world? When new violence breaks out in the quiet mountainside, Milt becomes caught up in writing a new novel: Mysterious Days. However, Milts new book does not only seek a murderer; it seeks a mythical grail of Milts very own.

In this wide-ranging and ambitious volume, Robert Royal, a prominent participant for many years in debates about religion and contemporary life, offers a comprehensive and balanced appraisal of the Catholic intellectual tradition in the twentieth century. The Catholic Church values both Faith and Reason, and Catholicism has given rise to extraordinary ideas and whole schools of remarkable thought, not just in the distant past but throughout the troubled decades of the twentieth century. Royal presents in a single volume a sweeping but readable account of how Catholic thinking developed in philosophy, theology, Scripture studies, culture, literature, and much more in the twentieth century. This involves great figures, recognized as such both inside and outside the Church, such as Jacques Maritain, Bernard Lonergan, Joseph Pieper, Edith Stein, Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, Romano Guardini, Karl Rahner, Henri du Lubac, Karol Wojtyla, Joseph Ratzinger, Hans Urs von Balthasar,Charles Peguy, Paul Claudel, George Bernanos, Francois Mauriac, G. K. Chesterton, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Christopher Dawson, Graham Greene, Sigrid Undset, J. R. R. Tolkien, Czeslaw Milosz, and many more. Royal argues that without rigorous thought, Catholicism - however welcoming and nourishing it might be - would become something like a doctor with a good bedside manner, but who knows little medicine. It has always been the aspiration of the Catholic tradition to unite emotion and intellect, action and contemplation. But unless we know what the tradition has already produced - especially in the work of the great figures of the recent past - we will not be able to answer the challenges that the modern world poses, or even properly recognize the true questions we face. This is a reflective, non-polemical work that brings together various strands of Catholic thought in the twentieth century. A comprehensive guide to the recent past - and the future.