The Dilithium Crystals have Shattered. Mr. Scott is dead.

lbrodine, it sounds like your professor spoke from a very Protestant POV (I would also disagree whether Biblical scholarship provoked the Renaissance as it was the old pagan works the philogists were studying.) I don’t think any Chesterton society would cite Protestantism as a benefit, but I could be wrong.

I suspect the lecture will simply portray the Crusades as an attempt by western Christendom to come to the military help of the eastern Christians propelled by the defeat of the Byzantines in 1071 at the Battle of Manzikert. It was that defeat which propelled the Emperor in Constantinople to ask the Pope for help. However, Pope Gregory VII was too busy with the Investiture crisis and could not act on the Emperor’s request for money to buy mercenaries. When a Pope did respond, he called for western knights and soldiers to come to Byzantium’s aid themselves.

The lecture will probably show that these “Muslim lands” still in fact had many, many Christians. Some areas were still perhaps majority Christian. It will place the attempted Christian reconquest in the context of the original Islamic invasions of the area in the 7th-8th centuries.

It will probably also detail what harassments Christian pilgrims faced to the Holy Land as well as how the indigenous Christians suffered under Islamic Sharia law.

It could, but I suspect probably won’t, also portray how the concept of militant Christianity did not exist prior to the Islamic jihads, but slowly evolved from Charlegmagne’s time to the Crusades.

In this respect, the Crusades appear to be quite reasonable as a military response rather than some unforseen aberration. Obviously, from today’s respective it is obscene to kill someone over belief in Christ who taught peace and compassion, but the Crusades does make sense as a response to the Islamic threat to Europe (which would resume again under the Ottomans).

I would be interested to know what the Crusades talk covers. it turns out that this morning in my Early/Medieval Church History course we talked about the Crusades.

my prof. pointed out how God actually used the evils of the Crusades to ultimately work for good. it brought a renewed interest in the cultures that the Bible was written in, which brought about the Renaissance and the Reformation. it exposed the corruption of the church and brought the Reformation. and it inspired the mixed results of expansion and colonialism; the positive result being the missionary movement.

I had never thought about these; clears things up a bit in my mind…

I agree with you on Green Day. It is very tired. I am not a conservative, but get a life for crying out loud. He isn’t as bad as people think he is.

Thanks for all the memories Scotty.