Fencing Bear at Prayer

Alex von Marstall and Richard Storey had a question for me! As the radical left is on an iconoclastic crusade to entirely and selectively erase Western history, we discuss the more sinister and dark side of their motivations with Professor Rachel Fulton Brown.  Rachel Fulton Brown, PhD, is Associate Professor of History, Fundamentals, and the College at the University of Chicago, where she has taught since 1994. She is the author of Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought and From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary, 800-1200 , and she blogs regularly at Fencing Bear at Prayer . She teaches courses on the history of Christianity in medieval Europe, as well as on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. She is best known in the public sphere for her friendship with Milo Yiannopoulos, whom she has characterized as a “holy fool.” Her own work emphasizes the importance of empathy, imagination, and play for the train...

Our culture is dying, or so some opine. How do we save it? With meter and rhyme! How do I say this? If we are losing our culture, it is because we have lost our words. We have lost the meter by which we built cities and poems , the measure of rhyme, the call and response in praise of our Maker, the great Artist of creatures and words. It is easier to exclaim this truth with gesture and breath than to write it. Writing takes patience and dictionaries. Long lists of words. Well-structured arguments. Persuasive imagery and fire. Stories and themes. What has happened to reading? What has happened to prose? I write now in short bursts on social media, blurts and quips. Slogans that puzzle—startle and tease. 𝕸𝖊𝖉𝖎𝖊𝖛𝖆𝖑 𝖔𝖗 𝕲𝕿𝕱𝕺 ꧁Totalitarianism, race war, chaos, or Christ. Choose wisely.꧂ Capture the moment! Stay not to think! Look, there’s a meme! Laugh now, and move on! “Okay, boomer, lmao.” “Say the n-word, I dare you.” “Your mother is fat.” Quick, now—reci...

Want to know what Milo and I were talking about last Friday? You can watch at Censored.tv where every Friday night’s all right ! For a complete list of my video, radio, and podcast appearances, see Bear On Air . To find Milo out in the wild, check the Milo Spotting Guide . For all our adventures together, see The MILO Chronicles . 

“All things have their season, and in their times all things pass under heaven.  A time to be born and a time to die.  A time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted.  A time to kill, and a time to heal.  A time to destroy, and a time to build.”  —Ecclesiastes 3:1-3 Imagine you are a child. You have a set of blocks. Somebody else made the blocks, and your parents bought them for you. The blocks come with plans that enable you to build a variety of buildings, far more complicated than you could build on your own. What do you do with these blocks? Perhaps you are lucky and you are gifted a full set of 3,851 blocks. Perhaps you only have a single tray of 105 blocks. You look at the pictures and determine that you will build only the most elaborate buildings, but when you realize you cannot read the plans, you give up and never play with the blocks at all. Alternately, you could start with the simplest plans, decide that you ha...

More poetry! Zaklog the Great and his friend Travis invited me to talk with them about John Donne’s Holy Sonnet V . I am a little world made cunningly Of elements and an angelic sprite, But black sin hath betray'd to endless night My world's both parts, and oh both parts must die. You which beyond that heaven which was most high Have found new spheres, and of new lands can write, Pour new seas in mine eyes, that so I might Drown my world with my weeping earnestly, Or wash it, if it must be drown'd no more. But oh it must be burnt; alas the fire Of lust and envy have burnt it heretofore, And made it fouler; let their flames retire, And burn me O Lord, with a fiery zeal Of thee and thy house, which doth in eating heal.  “Along the way, we also mention Galileo and his non-persecution by the church, Noah’s flood and the coming apocalypse by fire, Dante’s Inferno  and the stupidity of envy, and the importance of our physical bodies in Christianity.” Watch on...