Before hashtags, hot takes, and going vliral meant a million views, there was the medieval pilgrimage. In this episode, we explore how spiritual journeys to places like Canterbury and Compostela became the original social network. Pilgrimage was not just a religious ritual. It was a medieval mix of Twitter threads, TikTok trends, Amazon storefronts, and reputation management. Along muddy roads and crowded shrines, people traded stories, relics, gossip, and grace.

This is the story of how walking shaped belief, collapsed social classes, and curated a spiritual feed long before the internet. What if our digital networks are just faster echoes of something ancient? And what might it mean to recover the slowness of sacred travel today?

Theology Made is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Imagine a document so powerful it gave the pope divine authority over kings and no one questioned it for 700 years. It claimed to be from Constantine the Great himself. It was quoted, revered, and used to justify centuries of papal rule.

There’s just one problem: It was completely fake.

In this episode, we uncover the wild true story of the Donation of Constantine, the most influential forgery in Church history, and the unlikely hero who exposed it: a Renaissance linguist named Lorenzo Valla.

No sword. No protest. Just a pen, a sharp eye, and the courage to ask: “Who really wrote this?”

Theology Made is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Written and narrated by Jordan Vale

Music by Epidemic Sound

Copyright, Theology Made/Jordan Vale, 2025

References

Daniell, D. (1994). William Tyndale: A biography. Yale University Press.

Mozley, J. F. (1937). William Tyndale. The Macmillan Company.

The British Library. (n.d.). William Tyndale. https://www.bl.uk/people/william-tyndale

Reformation.org. (n.d.). Tyndale’s final words. https://www.reformation.org/tyndale-final-words.html

The Tyndale Society. (n.d.). Home. https://www.tyndale.org

King James Bible. (1611). Preface to the reader. (Original work published 1611)

Bebbington, D. W. (1989). Evangelicalism in modern Britain: A history from the 1730s to the 1980s. Unwin Hyman.