In this stimulating dialogue, often adversarial but always amicable, these two great men, who stand on opposite sides of the church door, discuss some of the most controversial issues of the day. One is the prince of the Church, a respected scholar and one of the pre-eminent ecumenical churchmen of Europe; the other the world famous author of The Name of the Rose , a scholar, philosopher and self-declared secularist, a man who writes with equal ease about Thomas Aquinas and James Joyce, about computers and the medieval Templars.