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How Christianity Created Universities · Theology Made Podcast

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Theology Made Podcast.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Jordan.
• 0:10
  SPEAKER_00: Today, we're going to look at how Christianity created universities.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's the year 1096.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: You're trudging along a muddy road in a small English town called Oxford,
• 0:22
  a place known mostly for its river crossing and its occasional
• 0:25
  brawls between
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  SPEAKER_00: townsfolk and traveling clerics.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_00: The air smells like wood smoke and damp wool.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_00: Chickens roam freely, merchants shout over crates of fish,
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  SPEAKER_00: Nothing here looks revolutionary.
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  SPEAKER_00: But then you hear it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Latin.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not in a church, not in a monastery, but in the open air.
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  SPEAKER_00: A crowd of young men gathered beneath a timbered roof,
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  SPEAKER_00: their cloaks wrapped tight against the cold,
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  SPEAKER_00: debating at the top of their lungs.
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  SPEAKER_00: You step closer.
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  SPEAKER_00: Inside a cramped hall,
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  SPEAKER_00: a master sits on a raised chair,
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  SPEAKER_00: parchment in hand,
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  SPEAKER_00: lecturing on Aristotle.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_00: Students lean forward,
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  SPEAKER_00: scratching notes onto wax tablets,
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  SPEAKER_00: interrupting him with questions he can barely finish answering.
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  SPEAKER_00: Outside,
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  SPEAKER_00: more students huddle in circles,
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  SPEAKER_00: arguing about logic,
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  SPEAKER_00: theology,
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  SPEAKER_00: grammar,
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  SPEAKER_00: their voices rising and falling like waves.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's not orderly,
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  SPEAKER_00: it's not quiet,
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  SPEAKER_00: it's not even officially sanctioned,
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  SPEAKER_00: but something unprecedented is happening here.
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  SPEAKER_00: A community of learners is forming.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not just monks, not nobles, not isolated scholars buried in monasteries.
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  These are ordinary students,
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  gathering to study regularly,
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  voluntarily,
• 1:37
  publicly.
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  SPEAKER_00: Oxford isn't a university yet.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not officially, not legally.
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  SPEAKER_00: But right here in this humble town,
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  SPEAKER_00: among cold halls and crowded debates,
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  the seeds of the university as we know it today are beginning
• 1:49
  to take root.
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  SPEAKER_00: And no one in 1096 realizes that this messy,
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  SPEAKER_00: noisy,
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  SPEAKER_00: candlelit experiment is about to reshape the entire intellectual world.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: If you lived in medieval Europe and you wanted to learn something,
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  SPEAKER_00: anything really,
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  SPEAKER_00: you had two choices.
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  SPEAKER_00: Become a monk or become wealthy.
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  SPEAKER_00: That's it.
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  No public schools,
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  no high schools,
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  no colleges,
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  no student loans,
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  no undeclared majors.
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  SPEAKER_00: Learning was either for the elite or for the religious.
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  SPEAKER_00: And for centuries, the center of learning was the monastery.
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  SPEAKER_00: Monks copied text by hand,
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  SPEAKER_00: monks preserved scripture,
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  SPEAKER_00: monks rescued ancient philosophy from oblivion,
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  SPEAKER_00: monks kept libraries alive,
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  SPEAKER_00: while the rest of the world tore itself apart,
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  SPEAKER_00: and monks brewed some of the best beer around.
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  SPEAKER_00: But eventually something unexpected happened.
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  SPEAKER_00: The monasteries got too good at learning.
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  SPEAKER_00: People wanted in.
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  SPEAKER_00: Merchants,
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  SPEAKER_00: lawyers,
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  SPEAKER_00: clerks,
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  SPEAKER_00: priests,
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  everyone suddenly wanted access to knowledge the monks had been
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  guarding for
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  SPEAKER_00: centuries.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that hunger set the stage for something new.
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  By the 11th century,
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  cities like Bologna,
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  Paris,
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  and Oxford were buzzing with energy.
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  SPEAKER_00: Commerce booming,
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  SPEAKER_00: trade routes opening,
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  SPEAKER_00: church courts expanding,
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  SPEAKER_00: and everywhere culture grew,
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  SPEAKER_00: ideas grew with it.
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  But ideas need a home,
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  and so the church did something unthinkable for the time.
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  SPEAKER_00: It created a place where anyone,
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  SPEAKER_00: not just monks,
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  SPEAKER_00: could study sacred and secular subjects together.
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  SPEAKER_00: The cathedral schools were first,
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  SPEAKER_00: built around bishop seats,
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  SPEAKER_00: and these schools taught scripture,
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  SPEAKER_00: grammar,
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  SPEAKER_00: and theology,
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  SPEAKER_00: but they also slipped in subjects like law,
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  SPEAKER_00: logic,
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  SPEAKER_00: and medicine.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the reason is because the church believed all truth is God's truth.
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  SPEAKER_00: And if God created the world,
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  SPEAKER_00: then studying the world,
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  SPEAKER_00: its laws,
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  SPEAKER_00: its logic,
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  SPEAKER_00: its order,
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  SPEAKER_00: was not a threat to faith.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was an act of worship.
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  SPEAKER_00: So these cathedral schools blossomed.
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  SPEAKER_00: And more students came than they could handle.
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  SPEAKER_00: Teachers grew famous.
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  SPEAKER_00: Crowds gathered to hear them lecture.
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  Students followed the best professors from city to city like
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  academic groupies.
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  And soon the church realized it needed something larger,
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  something more structured and official.
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  So it created a new kind of institution,
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  the university,
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  a guild of masters and students.
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  And here's what made the medieval university radically
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  different from anything before it.
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  SPEAKER_00: The first, it assumed the world was orderly,
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  SPEAKER_00: Not chaotic or random.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's not a playground of the gods.
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  Medieval Christians believed the universe had a rational
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  structure because it came
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  SPEAKER_00: from a rational creator.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that meant nature could be studied,
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  SPEAKER_00: laws could be discovered,
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  SPEAKER_00: ideas could be debated,
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  SPEAKER_00: truth was not fragile.
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  SPEAKER_00: The second thing is it assumed human minds could understand reality.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not perfectly, but at least in some meaningful way.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because the human mind was made in God's image.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that belief,
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  SPEAKER_00: unique to Christian theology,
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  SPEAKER_00: became the foundation of the scientific method as we know it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Three, it assumed questions were not dangerous.
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  SPEAKER_00: Doubt was not seen as rebellion.
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  SPEAKER_00: Inquiry was not treason.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it's why universities allowed debate between...
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  Augustine and Aristotle,
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  theology and law,
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  scripture and philosophy,
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  reason versus revelation.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not in a chaotic way,
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  SPEAKER_00: but in a confident way that the truth didn't need protection,
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  SPEAKER_00: it needed pursuit.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the medieval university had four core faculties,
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  SPEAKER_00: four pillars of learning that held up the entire intellectual world.
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  And each one reveals something about how Christians understood
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  both God and reality.
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  SPEAKER_00: The first, theology.
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  In the medieval mind,
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  theology wasn't just one subject among many,
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  it was the center of gravity.
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  SPEAKER_00: They called it the queen of the sciences.
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  SPEAKER_00: Not because it bullied the other subjects,
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  SPEAKER_00: and not because it controlled them like a tyrant,
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  SPEAKER_00: but because it ordered them.
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  The way the sun orders the solar system,
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  the way a compass orient the traveler.
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  SPEAKER_00: And theology answered the biggest questions.
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  SPEAKER_00: Why does anything exist?
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  SPEAKER_00: What is a human being for?
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  SPEAKER_00: What is good, true, beautiful?
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  SPEAKER_00: And every other discipline plugged into those answers.
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  SPEAKER_00: Physics described how things work.
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  SPEAKER_00: Theology explained why.
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  SPEAKER_00: Medicine healed the body.
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  SPEAKER_00: Theology told you the body mattered.
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  SPEAKER_00: Law governed society.
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  SPEAKER_00: Theology defined justice itself.
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  SPEAKER_00: Theology didn't limit knowledge.
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  SPEAKER_00: It gave knowledge meaning, purpose, direction, a horizon to aim for.
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  SPEAKER_00: And this is why in medieval universities,
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  SPEAKER_00: every student,
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  SPEAKER_00: no matter what their specialty was,
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  SPEAKER_00: eventually took theology.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because to know the world, you first had to know what the world was.
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  SPEAKER_00: Second was law.
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  SPEAKER_00: If theology was the mind of the university, law was the skeleton.
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  SPEAKER_00: And there wasn't just one kind of law.
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  SPEAKER_00: You had Roman law,
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  SPEAKER_00: the ancient legal tradition that shaped empires,
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  SPEAKER_00: property,
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  SPEAKER_00: contracts,
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  SPEAKER_00: inheritance,
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  SPEAKER_00: all systematized by Christian scholars.
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  Canon law,
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  the laws of the church,
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  marriage,
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  sacraments,
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  clergy,
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  morality,
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  discipline.
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  You had civil law,
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  the day-to-day legal framework of cities,
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  merchants,
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  guilds,
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  and trade.
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  SPEAKER_00: Together,
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  SPEAKER_00: these three streams created something revolutionary,
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  SPEAKER_00: a society that could function on principles and not personalities.
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  SPEAKER_00: Law students trained to reason, debate, argue, interpret.
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  SPEAKER_00: These were skills the medieval world desperately needed.
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  Because without lawyers,
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  you can't run a church,
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  a city,
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  a kingdom,
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  or a civilization.
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  SPEAKER_00: Christianity didn't just preach the gospel.
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  SPEAKER_00: It built legal systems that made culture flourish.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the university was where those systems were forged.
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  SPEAKER_00: Third was medicine.
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  SPEAKER_00: Medicine in the medieval university wasn't mechanical.
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  SPEAKER_00: Doctors didn't study the body like it was a broken engine.
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  SPEAKER_00: They studied it as a sacred creation,
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  SPEAKER_00: a marvel of design,
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  SPEAKER_00: a sign of divine wisdom,
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  SPEAKER_00: a vessel of life breathed into dust.
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  SPEAKER_00: And their work came straight out of Christian conviction.
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  SPEAKER_00: If humans bear God's image, then healing them is holy.
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  SPEAKER_00: And this is why hospitals grew out of monasteries,
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  SPEAKER_00: nuns became some of the earliest nurses,
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  SPEAKER_00: Christian charity drove medical care.
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  SPEAKER_00: Universities placed medicine alongside theology.
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  And medieval medical students studied anatomy,
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  humors,
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  herbs,
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  diet,
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  circulation.
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  SPEAKER_00: Primitive by modern standards, but groundbreaking in their time.
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  SPEAKER_00: And they saw sickness as something to be treated, not punished.
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  SPEAKER_00: That bodies, they're worth saving.
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  SPEAKER_00: They're not disposable.
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  SPEAKER_00: And in doing so, they laid the foundations for Western healthcare.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then fourth was the liberal arts.
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  Before you could study theology,
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  law,
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  or medicine,
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  you had to learn how to think.
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  SPEAKER_00: Enter the liberal arts,
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  SPEAKER_00: not electives or side courses,
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  SPEAKER_00: but the core curriculum of the medieval university.
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  SPEAKER_00: And they were divided into two groups.
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  SPEAKER_00: Trivium, which is how to think.
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  Grammar,
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  so not boring sentence diagrams,
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  but the architecture of language itself.
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  And what this did is it taught clarity,
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  it taught precision,
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  it taught the power of words.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then logic, how to argue without nonsense.
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  SPEAKER_00: How to detect bad reasoning and how to follow an idea to its conclusion.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then rhetoric,
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  SPEAKER_00: how to persuade an audience,
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  SPEAKER_00: how to communicate truth beautifully and compellingly.
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  So grammar gave you structure,
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  logic gave you clarity,
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  rhetoric gave you your voice.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then the quadrivium.
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  SPEAKER_00: How to see the order of the world.
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  SPEAKER_00: First you had arithmetic.
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  SPEAKER_00: Numbers, patterns, proportions.
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  SPEAKER_00: Think of it like the fingerprint of divine order.
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  Then geometry,
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  space,
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  measurement,
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  the logic behind architecture and creation.
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  SPEAKER_00: And then interestingly, music.
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  SPEAKER_00: But not performance, the mathematics of harmony.
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  To medieval Christians,
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  music was math made audible,
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  a glimpse of the order behind everything.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: And then astronomy,
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  SPEAKER_00: the movement of the heavens,
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  SPEAKER_00: the rhythm of seasons,
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  SPEAKER_00: the calendar of the church,
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  SPEAKER_00: the dance of stars that seemed to whisper of a creator.
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  SPEAKER_00: And together, these two did one thing.
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  SPEAKER_00: They trained the mind to be human,
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  SPEAKER_00: to think clearly,
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  SPEAKER_00: speak truthfully,
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  SPEAKER_00: calculate accurately,
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  SPEAKER_00: imagine boldly,
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  SPEAKER_00: reflect deeply.
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  SPEAKER_00: And wonder wisely.
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  SPEAKER_00: And more than preparing you for a job, they prepared you for life.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the medieval university wasn't created to pump out workers.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was designed to feed the economy.
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  SPEAKER_00: It was built to shape souls,
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  SPEAKER_00: to cultivate wisdom,
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  SPEAKER_00: to form character,
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  SPEAKER_00: to teach people how to seek truth,
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  SPEAKER_00: recognize beauty,
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  SPEAKER_00: and do justice and live well.
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  And that vision,
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  the Christian vision,
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  is the root of every university that exists today.
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  SPEAKER_00: Even the ones that have forgotten where they came from.
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  SPEAKER_00: But here's the thing.
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  The reason universities could exist at all was because the
• 9:54
  church protected academic freedom.
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  SPEAKER_00: Popes granted university charters,
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  SPEAKER_00: which meant kings couldn't ship them down,
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  SPEAKER_00: nobles couldn't tax them,
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  SPEAKER_00: bishops couldn't control them,
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  SPEAKER_00: cities couldn't force their curriculum.
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  The Pope's protection let scholars debate openly without fear
• 10:10
  of political retaliation.
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  And if a professor got in trouble with local authorities,
• 10:14
  he could simply appeal to Rome.
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  SPEAKER_00: And Rome, shockingly, often sided with the professor.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because theology, it thrives on truth, not censorship.
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  SPEAKER_00: And so Oxford became a magnet for thinkers.
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  SPEAKER_00: Paris became the center of theology.
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  SPEAKER_00: Bologna became the law capital of Europe.
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  And students traveled hundreds of miles on foot to study in
• 10:32
  these places.
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  SPEAKER_00: Many slept on floors, ate one meal a day, lived in cold, cramped rooms.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the reason?
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: They were hungry for knowledge.
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  And the church had created the only place in the world where
• 10:41
  you could find it.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: Professors wrote commentaries,
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: students debated in public squares,
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  SPEAKER_00: ideas collided,
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  SPEAKER_00: arguments sharpened,
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  SPEAKER_00: and slowly,
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  SPEAKER_00: painfully...
• 10:50
  But I think brilliantly,
• 10:51
  the university tradition began to reshape Western civilization.
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  SPEAKER_00: So why did Christians do this?
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: Why create a system that trained people to ask hard questions?
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Why take theology,
• 11:00
  SPEAKER_00: the crown jewel of the faith,
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  SPEAKER_00: and place it inside an institution swarming with skeptics,
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  SPEAKER_00: philosophers,
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: scientists,
• 11:06
  SPEAKER_00: and legal theorists?
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  SPEAKER_00: Why risk confusion, disagreement, debate?
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  It's because Christians believe something the ancient world
• 11:14
  never dared to believe.
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  SPEAKER_00: Truth is unified, it's consistent, and truth is not afraid of questions.
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  If God made the universe,
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  then studying the universe will naturally lead you towards Him.
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  If God made the human mind,
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  then using your mind is not rebellion,
• 11:29
  it's obedience.
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  SPEAKER_00: And if God is truth, then every truth is God's truth.
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  SPEAKER_00: The university was not created to challenge Christianity.
• 11:35
  It was created because Christianity believed truth was worth
• 11:38
  the challenge.
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  SPEAKER_00: Today, universities may seem secular, distant, even hostile to faith.
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  SPEAKER_00: But their foundations, unmistakably Christian.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_00: The lecture hall is a Christian invention.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: The degree system is a Christian invention.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: The idea of objective truth is a Christian inheritance.
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_00: Academic freedom came from papal protection.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: Science grew out of theological confidence.
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  SPEAKER_00: The liberal arts were shaped by monastic discipline.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_00: The entire concept of higher education, it is rooted in Christian soil.
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  SPEAKER_00: So the next time you walk onto a college campus,
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  SPEAKER_00: past brick halls and grassy quads,
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  SPEAKER_00: and lecture rooms filled with questions,
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  SPEAKER_00: remember,
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: you're standing in the cathedral of the mind,
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  SPEAKER_00: built by Christians,
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  SPEAKER_00: funded by faith,
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  fueled by a belief that God made a world worth studying and
• 12:21
  minds capable of
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  SPEAKER_00: understanding it.
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  SPEAKER_00: And that's the real reason Christians create universities.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_00: Not to escape the world, but to explore it.
• 12:31
  If this episode opened your eyes to how much of your world was
• 12:33
  shaped by the
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: church,
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: you'll love my Theology Made Simple course.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: I'll teach you the same way the first universities did.
• 12:39
  SPEAKER_00: The link is in the show notes.