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Thanks be to God.

June 2008-November 2016

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Lobstercide

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Apropos that Google memo...






The players, in order of appearance  Fuzzy Bear, a gamer Rules Bear, a stickler Dragon, a creature  Medal Bear, a gentleman  Fencing Bear, an athlete History Bear, an academic Mammoth, a socialite  Bear of Hearts, friend of Mammoth Clown Bear, another friend  Script by Master Bearson  Production note: As I originally envisioned this morality tale, it was going to be entitled “Sexism 101,” but my son insisted that I be more subtle. And since the point of the piece is about the way in which women take over men’s games, and I had asked for his help giving the toys a game to talk about...it was only fair that I listen to him! Fencing Bear wanted to be much, much bitchier.
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Why I Study Mary

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Recommended reading! Read on...

UPDATE as of April 30, 2018: The First Things link has expired. Here was my original text.

What has motivated you to study Mary as a scholar?
I grew up in the Presbyterian church, which has no tradition of devotion to the Virgin Mary. I first encountered the medieval devotion to Mary through a course I took in college on women in the Middle Ages. At the time, I was also reading a good deal of feminist theology, which seemed to me at odds with the image of the Virgin that I encountered in the medieval sources. My goal as a scholar has been to recover an appreciation for the way in which medieval Christians prayed to Mary in the liturgy and imagined her through their reading of Scripture. Without Mary, I have become convinced, there can be no Christianity. I want to help modern Christians appreciate why Mary is necessary both theologically and devotionally to our understanding and experience of God.
How do you teach college students about the Virgin Mary in…
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Mysterium tremendum et fascinans

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What would you do if you found yourself in the presence of the divine? 



Last Friday, my friends from Three Kraters Symposium and I gathered together in a secret location—we rented a house—for a special anniversary episode of our show. To mark the occasion, we decided to dress up—in togas. Our show is, after all, titled after the drinking vessels used in ancient symposia, and we open each episode with a toast to our health (“Ymas!”) and to the truth that we hope to imbibe through our conversation (“In vino veritas!”). Little did my friends know that I had something even more special in store for them than just a chance to meet each other in person!

Only I and a few helpers were in on the secret. As far as most of my friends knew, we were going to be recording that evening, so we would need to spend the day setting up, rearranging the furniture, getting the cameras and lighting ready, making sure everyone would be in costume for when we started filming the show. But then came the crisis:…
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One Angry Judge

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What would you do if during the course of a job interview you were accused of crimes so heinous that they would not only disqualify you for the position, but also land you in jail—justifiably, if you were guilty—for the rest of your life?

According to some 2,400 members of the American legal profession, including some of my own colleagues at the University of Chicago, Brett Kavanaugh is incapable of serving as an Associate Justice on the Supreme Court of the United States because he was “intemperate” when accused publicly not just of high school and college drunkenness, but of rape, gang-rape, and attempted rape.

In their words:
Judicial temperament is one of the most important qualities of a judge....   We are law professors who teach, research, and write about the judicial institutions of this country.... We regret that we feel compelled to write to you to provide our views that at the Senate hearings on Thursday, September 28 [sic*], 2018, the Honorable Brett Kavanaugh displayed a …
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Would you sign a letter in my support?

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The National Association of Scholars has written a letter addressed to my university and to the Medieval Academy of America asking them, as institutions, to affirm that I remain a scholar in good standing based on my conduct over the past year while under fire from my own colleagues in academia.

The issue is not about politics so much as it is about the culture that we would like to have in academia: whether it is to be a culture in which we support vigorous academic debate or one in which name-calling (“fascist, neo-Nazi, white supremacist”) is going to be allowed to shut down debate. As Milo put it in his coverage of the NAS appeal,
Although universities generally refrain from taking sides in academic debates, the NAS open letter is asking Chicago and the MAA to do something different, and merely affirm that Fulton Brown is an academic in good professional standing who has not harassed or discriminated against her colleagues. This is a matter of historical record, and should not be …
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