Today, Mike will be focusing on the rise of the Medieval University, which is important because it was largely a Christian venture and university education begins to have an increasingly significant impact across the world. 

In a future lecture Mike will be talking about the rise of Higher Education in the United States, which is its own story. Today he briefly looks back at the academies that were sprouting up back during Augustine’s life, before skipping ahead to the Monestary and Cathedral schools that are the genesis for schools like The University of Paris, Oxford, Cambridge and many others.

We'll be focusing on Aristotle, Anselm, Aquinas and their contributions to the rise of Scholasticism.

A.            In today’s podcast, we will be exploring the challenges the church has with power and looking at some of its internal efforts at reform – most notably, the work of Pope Gregory VII and the Cluniac movement. 

In today’s podcast, we'll focus on the Great Schism of 1054, which divided the church between the West — the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches — and the East — the capital “O” Orthodox churches.

At this moment, about one-third of the world’s population makes some sort of claim to be a follower of Christ.  That means that the group Jesus launched with just a few, has spread and grown more dynamically than any other movement in history. How did this happen? In Episode 18 of One Hundred Plus, Mike is going to leverage the impact of Saint Columba, a 6th century Irish missionary, to provide an overview of the history of mission.  He will back up to show Jesus commissioning his simple and unimpressive followers to launch the church, and then trace how it grows to become, what is now, the oldest, largest, longest-lasting, most geographically-dispersed and ethnically-diverse organization in history.