Making Mary Visible


A taste of the argument to come in my forthcoming book. Read on...

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“Like Hitler, or Milo Yiannopoulos”

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Back in November 2017, Lindsay Shepherd, a graduate student at Wilfred Laurier University in Ontario, was taken to task by two of her professors for showing a clip of a television show in which Professor Jordan Peterson talked about the problems he saw with Canada’s proposed Bill C-16 and the effects it would have on freedom of speech. Her professors’ complaint? That showing the video clip was tantamount to putting the students in her discussion section at risk of doxxing, harassment, and physical threat because—they alleged—Professor Peterson had engaged in similar activities directed at his own students. In her supervising professor Nathan Rambukkana’s words : [Peterson] is a real person. But he is a real person who has engaged in targeting of trans students, basically doxxing them, if you know the term, giving out their personal information, so that they'll be attacked, harrassed, so that death threats will find them. This is something that he has done to his own students...
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On Being a Christian in the Academy

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Rachel Fulton Brown is an Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Chicago where she works on the history of Christianity with a focus on devotion to the Virgin Mary, a subject about which she has written two books. We talk about how she became a medievalist, how this led to her conversion to Catholicism, the experience of being a conservative and a Catholic in 21st-century academe, and why she teaches The Lord of the Rings . My host John Tangney with the Intellectual Diversity Podcast asks difficult questions! Listen  here . For a full list of my podcasts and videos, go here .
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Our Lady and the Old Infant

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The convener of one of the Jordan Peterson Facebook groups that I participate in has been pushing me for some time now to be more compassionate towards our professorial “father.” Or, as my friend puts it: “to take off your fencing gear and model the Nourishing Feminine.” Okay, then, but I have to warn you. It is going to hurt. What do I see when I look at Jordan Peterson with a mother’s eyes? I should preface my reflections with the caveat that I speak here not just as the mother of a son, but also as an historian. Reading the textual accounts left by people about their thoughts and emotions is what I do in my scholarship. Just as Jordan has spent the past thirty years as a clinical psychologist, I have spent them as a reader of texts,* my goal as an author being to help the texts speak to audiences for whom they no longer mean anything. I have practiced listening to my texts just as Jordan has practiced listening to his patients, and I hope that I have been able to hear. More ...
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The Eternal Feminine*

Paradoxically, given the fact that I've spent my entire academic life thinking about the Virgin Mary, I very rarely say anything directly about gender. You'd think I should, right? Most people do--think that I should, that is. Because, of course, most people who have written about Mary in the past thirty or so years have. Marina Warner, Mary Daly, Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Rosemary Radford Reuther: how well I remember reading their work while I was in college and being swept up into the debate on the feminine image of the divine. Reading Andrew Greeley's The Mary Myth (1977) is bringing it all back to me, and not in a good way. I'm discouraged, because I was really enjoying his treatment of Jesus and Sinai . Now, however, I am beset with sentences such as these: "I will contend that Mary is a symbol of the feminine component of the deity. She represents the human insight that the Ultimate is passionately tender, seductively attractive, irresistibly insp...
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Survive the Jive in Academia!

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I was very happy to join Tom Rowsell on Survive the Jive  for a conversation about my experience in academia as a Christian and the problem of getting inside the medieval mind. Which is harder: thinking like an academic or thinking like a medieval Christian?! Join us to find out! For a complete list of my video, radio, and podcast appearances, see Bear On Air .
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