Crusading in our times

I subscribe to Google and Yahoo alerts with the keyword Crusades. I get every day topics and headlines where the word crusades is used in different ways. It's a wide range of hits, from religious and zealous newspapers discussing different forms of crusading to teachers going in crusade against the analfabetism and doctors crusading against the polio or the cancer. I am raised by German nuns and until I read Amin Maloufs book "The Crusades trough Arab eyes", I believed the Crusades was an enterprise based on faith and beliefs, and we, Christians, defended the places where Christ lived and died.
Maloufs book widened my perspective and I am now researching on the "hidden history of the Crusades", the clashes but also the bridges, how Christianity and the Islam met and exchanged knowledge and cultural uses, food, spices, botanic, medicine, philosophy, art.

crusading

Jerusalem,1099