Welcome to episode 26 of the Behind the Catholic Counter Podcast. I'm Ian Rutherford, President of Aquinasnandmore.com. I interview Catholic authors, publishers and manufacturers to give you the latest news about great new Catholic books and gifts. You can listen to this and past episodes at aquinasandmore.com/podcast.
This week, I interviewed Charle McKinnie, president of Sophia Institute Press about the books he is publishing in partnership with NBC about the new miniseries A.D., the Bible Continues about the Acts of the Apostles. The miniseries starts on Easter Sunday.
Ian: Today, I'm interviewing Charlie McKinney, president of Sophia Institute Press. We're going to discuss the upcoming series on NBC about the Acts of the Apostles and the corresponding books that Sophia has published. At the end of our interview, I'll have a couple of special offers for our listeners. Charlie, thank you for joining me on the show today!
Charlie: Ian thanks for having me it's good to be here.
Ian: When I first saw these books on your website, I just thought that they were new books about The Acts of The Apostles but then I saw the NBC peacock logo on them in that new miniseries, so what is this miniseries and how did you get involved in it?
Charlie: Well, I don't know if you can recall, or maybe many of your listener's recall the Bible Series which was on the History Channel last year.
Ian: Yes.
Charlie: It's had like a hundred million viewers which is an incredible series, it was very well done, it was authentic and was produced by Mark Burnett who has done The Voice and The Survivor and Celebrity Apprentice, a very high level producer in Hollywood and his wife Roma Downey who you may recall from Touched by an Angel, you know a decade or more ago and they, as Christians, they put this thing together and it just, it was a sort of unexpected success on the History Channel and what sort of grew out of the results of the movie, which was released last year, was The Son of God which was sort of a two hour excerpt from the series.
Anyway, this program was so popular that Mark and Roma approached NBC and they picked up the sequel, which is A.D. The Bible Continues, which covers essentially the first ten chapters of the Acts of The Apostles. And so it just kind of continues the Bible Series and it began with the Death and Resurrection of Christ in Episode one, and then for the next eleven weeks, so twelve weeks total will follow the lives of the early Christians to Saint Peter and the early apostles, the conversion of Saul to Paul and it just has all the intrigue in there, everything that happened, the martyrdom of Saint Steven, everything that sort of followed in the first ten chapters of The Acts the Apostles. They did a beautiful job.
We read the scripts in the here, excellent we've watched, our staff watched the first two episodes and there's just an incredible – incredible, very well done and authentic series that we're very excited about the opportunity for evangelization.
And so how did we get involved? Well, we were invited to submit a product list and we did and we essentially won, we were given the opportunity to produce these resources and we're very excited to do it and so we put out two books. One is the Catholic Viewers Guide and which was written by our staff, especially Veronica Burschard, who's our vice president for education program and then a trade book, called Ministers and Martyrs which is by Matt Mike Aquilina . So we got to work on this in October and these books are being released this month.
Ian: So when the original series came out, had they already planned on doing a second series or that came about because the first one was so successful?
Charlie: Yes. They might have had something in the back of their mind but there wasn't – it wasn't anything set in stone for sure. It was because of the success of the first one that,
