Beneath the Headlines

Today’s One Hundred Plus Podcast is a bit different. Over the last year, Mike has been walking through an historical overview of 100 of the most important people, places and ideas of the last 2,000 years. It has been a survey of the forces and factors that have shaped today’s world, the Christian faith and you.    The plan has been to lay the track of the one hundred topics and then to double back...

Today’s episode is the third part in our overview of the Protestant Reformation, which started when a young Augustinian monk nailed 95 theses onto the door of the castle church in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517, and became one of the most influential revolutions in Western Civilization. We have been focused on one of the true pivot points in Western Civilization – the Protestant Reformation, which ha...

Today we begin our multi-week focus on the Renaissance, staring with Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel and then stepping back to consider the important intersections of faith and art.

A.   In today’s lecture, Mike will be discussing on the rise of Human Rights, showing how they are grounded in the Christian Worldview and tracing their development over three thousand years. 

 In today’s lecture, Mike will be focusing on two of the Pre-Reformers, John Wycliffe and Jan Hus, explaining what they did that got them sideways with the authorities, and why.  The Bible is the most significant book of all time. Most claims to be “the best” or “the biggest” are long on hype.  Not here.  There are many ways to substantiate the Bible’s dominance. Today we turn to two men who are s...

This episode will focuses on the Fourth Lateran Council, a 13th century event you have likely never heard of – and can’t imagine you are listening to a lecture on it. But this council – which is often referred to as the Great Council – is important for a handful of reasons. The one Mike will be highlighting today deals with the formalized endorsement of the doctrine of Transubstantiation. Which is...

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 wer...

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.

Today we're looking at the impact of one of the most famous Brits of all time – a quiet Benedictine Monk named Bede.  He is then going to show how Bede fits into a long line of Christians who elevate the life of the mind.

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...

On today’s episode we look at Gregory the Great, a remarkable figure who shaped the church and impacted the world at a fragile moment in Western History.  It is hard to imagine how different our lives would be without this man. Mike is going to give you an overview of his life, talk about how he changed the trajectory of the West and suggest that we all look to raise our game in light of his examp...

Today, we continue our slide into the Middle Ages with a look at Monasticism in general and St. Benedict in particular. Not that long ago, monks were viewed as odd and quirky. Today, they are often celebrated for their wines and cheeses, and their monasteries have gained quite a bit of cultural cache as exactly the kind of place to go to detox from this crazy world.  Neither view is particularly a...