Dr. Thomas Madden, whose expertise has been sought by The New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, NPR, and The History Channel, delivered a talk entitled “Rethinking Holy War: The Crusades and Catholic Devotion in the Middle Ages.” Madden exposed many contemporary misunderstandings of the Crusades as uneducated and lacking in any real evidence. Madden posited that in order to understand the Crusades, one has to have an understanding of “Medieval piety.”