“Satan, be gone!”

This is the last post I wanted to write, but it has become clear that if I do not write it, I will never write anything else.

So here goes.

This time last year I was preparing my file to submit to my department in expectation of being promoted to full professor.

I probably don’t need to say any more, you can all check my title on the department web page now—go ahead, I’ll wait—although as one benefit, as part of the review process I did have to write statements about my research and teaching which I have posted on my academic home page as introductions to my method and goals.

I got the news—I kid you not—on Friday the 13th.

In April.

Seven months ago.

Since when, I have been living a lie. Or a half truth. Or...oh, fuck it, it sucks.

Because it is nonsense, of course. I deserve to be promoted to full professor.

I have published a second major monograph with a prestigious academic publisher (our standard in the department, barring an outside offer from another university) that has been described in the flagship journal for my field as a “magnum opus” likely to be a “game-changer” in the long-overdue reassessment of Vatican II’s deficient Mariology.

I have held fellowships from the Mellon Foundation (twice), the American Council of Learned Societies (twice), and the Guggenheim (you only get one of those per lifetime).

I have won the oldest award in the country for excellence in undergraduate teaching (the Quantrell Award) as well as a Provost’s award for my teaching.

I have designed and taught now thirty different courses for undergraduates and graduates in the twenty-five years since I was hired at the University of Chicago as a newly-minted Ph.D. (Syllabi here.)

I have written over thirty reviews of books in my academic field and published sixteen substantive peer-reviewed articles, with additional pieces under contract and in press.

My first monograph won the prize from the Medieval Academy of America for a first book published on a medieval subject “judged to be...of outstanding quality,” as well as a prize for the best book in intellectual history published in 2002.

I have done all the appropriate service to my profession and my university as a reviewer, committee member, conference participant, and colleague.

And on Friday, April 13th, of this year, I was told that my scholarship was not good enough for the University of Chicago to promote me to full professor.

I will let that sink in for a little bit.

My department chairs and deans have bent over backward these past seven months assuring me that there was nothing political in their decision to deny my bid for promotion at this time.

It was the outside letters they received, they said. It was the outside letters that judged my work to be not of sufficient scholarly merit—although on what basis, my chairs and deans will not say.

It is insane.

But then the world is insane—and its ruler is the Father of Lies.

How do I know this? Because in all these months since the horror descended—“Your work is not sufficiently scholarly,” my chair told me—I have never once looked at my book in hate.

Which is interesting.

After I got tenure on the strength of my first monograph, it was years before I could look at it without wanting to rip it to shreds. Okay, maybe not rip it to shreds physically, but metaphorically—tear it apart for not being the book that it should have been if only I hadn’t been so afraid.

Don’t get me wrong, my first book is outstanding. It fully deserved the awards and reviews it received.

But it is wholly an academic book, making no claims on the reader as an exercise of faith.

With my second book I was bolder.

It is right there on the first page of the Acknowledgments: “I am grateful to Mary, for choosing me to write this book on her behalf and trusting me, a cradle Presbyterian, with the recovery of the devotion with which medieval Christians prayed to her.”

Mind you, at the end of the acknowledgments, I also thank my dog Joy—but clearly my colleagues were not fooled.

I am a woman of faith.

Of all of the criticisms I have received over the past two years in my writing about Milo, perhaps the most telling is a letter that twenty-nine of my colleagues in the Divinity School signed, distancing themselves from my toxic insistence on the importance of studying theology.

Okay, that is not quite what they said.

They said: “Professor Brown promulgates a view of religion and theology that is not widely represented among the Divinity School community’s diverse views”—which is telling, given that what I had argued in my account of “why Milo scares students and faculty even more” was that students need practice talking about religion as religion, not just as a lens for talking about something else.

In my words:

It is much easier to call Milo names than to accept the challenge he presents. Milo’s tour has made clear how high the stakes are. If you drive out explicit theology from public education, you get not no theology, but only bad theology, theology never properly examined as such. It is a mistake not to teach religion as religion.

Imagine if my colleagues in the Biological or Physical Sciences divisions refused to teach biology as biology or mathematics as math.

Religion is the only discipline in the academy that is required by the academy to deny its own truth claims in order to be considered “scholarly.”

Historians teach students history as history.

Sociologists teach students sociology as sociology.

Physicists teach students physics as physics. 

Scholars of literature teach students literature as...no, never mind.

But try teaching religion, correction, Christianity as something other than an outdated cultural artifact of Western civilization (if that even exists), never mind as a possible repository of truth, and you are sitting in your department chair’s office on Friday the 13th being solemnly assured that you are not a scholar.

Maybe it wasn’t that.

Maybe it was that I argued in my book for a continuity of the Christian tradition going back to antiquity, thus challenging the iron-clad periodizations to which historians and scholars of religion are professionally obliged to adhere. (I mark them in my footnotes as “dragons,” transitions across periods about which there is significant scholarly disagreement. See pp. 519n46, 520n66, 525nn134 and 147, 528n199, 531n253, 539n21, and 557n208.)

Maybe it was that I introduced each chapter in the book with a short second-person exercise, inviting the reader to imagine him or herself saying the Office of the Virgin as a medieval Christian might have prayed. (I support these exercises in the footnotes with detailed references to the primary sources on which I draw.)

Maybe it was that I suggested there is a scriptural basis clearly articulated since antiquity for the devotion to the Virgin Mary as the temple of God, the place in which the Lord took on flesh so as to become visible to the world, grounded in the ancient expectation that the Mother of the Lord was the one who anointed him as king and stood beside him on his throne. (See chapter 3, where I trace this tradition from the early Christian reading of the psalms as speaking of Jesus as “LORD” to the recitation of the psalms in the Marian Office.)

Maybe it was that I wrote my book in a style that even members of my new parish describe as enjoyable and accessible to readers of faith. (I gave a presentation a few weeks ago as part of our 150th Anniversary speakers series, and some had copies for me to sign.)

Maybe.

But I doubt it.

And the reason I doubt it?

Because I do not hate my book.

I was having coffee on Wednesday this past week with a young woman in my neighborhood who had been reading my book.

She came to our meeting with a notebook full of questions about Milo, my book, and my blog, but in the course of the conversation it became clear that there was one question which mattered above all.

“Do you believe what you wrote in your book about Mary?”

I assured her, “Yes, yes I do.”

And she said: “I am so happy. I could not bear to think that you had written what you did simply as an academic exercise. I could not bear to think you did not believe it was true.”

Hail, Mary, full of grace. The LORD is with you. Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb.

Fuck you, Satan. Be gone.

I will never betray my LORD and Our Lady for you.

You can buy my book here. You can read chapter 2 on the Ave Maria here. Thank you for reading!