The Ring and the Cross

The Ring and the Cross is both history and fiction, a novel based on real events in Merovingian France that were chronicled by St. Gregory of Tours. The playboy poet Fortunatus transforms his life through a spiritual love for Radegund, a queen-turned-nun. Together they try to keep the rulers of early France from tearing their country apart with civil wars and assassinations. Two of those rulers, Sigibert and Brunhild, were the originals of Siegfried and Brunhilde, the doomed lovers who appear in myth, literature, and opera. As in our own time, ordinary people in this book try to live compassionately in a world turned upside down by rapid and frightening change. When we look in the mirror of history, we see our own face. Our age is also struggling with incompetent, polarized leadership, economic collapse, inflated currency, pervasive violence, and mindless promiscuity. Yet in the face of such cultural decay, spiritual people--both then and now--try to seed the future with decency and hope for a harvest of peace.