Fencing Bear at Prayer

I would not want to be this young woman. By now, five months after the event she attended at the University of Massachusetts Amherst featuring a discussion with Christina Hoff Sommers, Steven Crowder, and Milo Yiannopoulos on the problems besetting university campuses with speech considered "triggering," she has become a favorite meme among those who see such concerns as at best mildly hysterical, at worst a symptom of the total breakdown of our national character (I paraphrase). Audiences at several of Milo's recent talks (which you can see here ) have made reference to her, imitating her arm gestures (which I am having a hard time ignoring on the gif as I am writing) and laughing at her expense. Milo, to his credit, has admonished them: "No, we love Trigglypuff! Trigglypuff is wonderful!," while insisting that it is not she, but those who have lied to her about what will make her happy that are to blame. "She is going to be miserable," he has said (a...

As I am sure you are all aware, a few weeks ago, John Ellison, the Dean of Students in the College at the University of Chicago, sent a letter out to all of our incoming freshman in which he described some of the things that they should expect--and not expect--to encounter as students in the College. "One of the University of Chicago's defining characteristics," he told them, "is our commitment to freedom of inquiry and expression.... Members of our community are encouraged to speak, write, listen, challenge and learn, without fear of censorship. Civility and mutual respect are vital to all of us, and freedom of expression does not mean the freedom to harass or threaten others. You will find that we expect members of our community to be engaged in rigorous debate, discussion, and even disagreement. At times this may challenge you and even cause discomfort." Not, arguably, all that remarkable a claim, you might think. Of course our students should expect to fee...

I thought it was a funny photo, so I shared it on my Facebook wall. Apparently, or so several of my friends are anxious to tell me, it isn't funny at all and I should be very careful at this moment in our nation's election season not to make jokes about Secretary Clinton, because as everyone knows, Donald Trump is terribly, terribly dangerous.  As one of my friends from college posted almost immediately: "Dislike! Rachel, I respect and love you, and consider you one of the most intelligent persons I know, but I believe that you are not seeing Hillary Clinton for the strong candidate that she is. I had issues at first, too, but then I realized that my prejudice was more about Bill Clinton, and I now admire Secretary Clinton without reservation." Another friend submitted soon thereafter: "Submitting Barty Crouch Jr (lunatic with borderline multiple personalities who impersonated Mad Eye) as a better substitution for Lockhart, if we're in this unive...

You may remember that I quit this sport . Well, on Friday this past week, in Dallas at the USFA Summer National Championships, I finished 5th in Veteran Women's 50-59 Foil, which with my other two results from this competition year (6th-place Finalist at the December 2015 NAC in Baltimore, and Silver Medalist at the April 2016 NAC in Richmond), enabled me to qualify as a member of the USA Foil Team for the 2016 Veteran World Championships this October in Germany. I'll wait for you to get up from off the floor. Laughter is always good medicine. I should probably write some more about how I came back from quitting and what it has been like since I did. But for now, I need to say, "Thank you." Success is not something that happens without friends. I had no idea when I started fencing thirteen years ago more or less to the day that this journey would be as challenging as it has been. I would not be the fencer I am now without years and years of others' love an...

Over at Stanford, things are heating up : a group of students are calling for a discussion about whether their college's curriculum should include a "Western Civilization" humanities requirement, and the fur has well and truly started to fly. As the editor of the Standford Review  reports, in the past two weeks since the Review  published its petition, People writing articles in defense of the Western canon have been marginalized and silenced within groups whose policy priorities have nothing to do with curricular requirements. Signers of the petition have reported being personally called out in dining halls and student group meetings, and have been systematically contacted to justify their signatures, They have also been publicly branded as supporters of “racism”, “elitism”, “classism” and “hatred”. Finally, two members of the Stanford activist community have publicly announced that they have downloaded the list of signatories, and intend to use it against vo...

I can tell you in three words: because culture matters . More particularly: because the ideas, images, and stories with which we fill our imaginations shape our souls as well as our actions in the world. I know, I know. This is not the argument that we are supposed to make. We are supposed to talk about "tools" and "critical thinking" and the skills that we can gain in writing and making arguments. But this is like praising a hammer without having any understanding of what you might use it for. You could use it to kill just as easily as you could use it to make something. For the last fifty or so years, we have been using the tools which we develop by studying the liberal arts as much to destroy our culture as to craft it. We need to recover the craft, but to do so, we have to have materials to work with, not just skills or tools that we might apply willy-nilly to anything. Herrad of Landsberg, Hortus deliciarum  (1185): The Seven Liberal Arts Reading, writ...

My new friend and colleague Andrew Holt has leaped into the fray and asked me some challenging questions about the kerfuffle that ensued over my " Talking Points: Three Cheers for White Men " post. He also gives a much more coherent account that I ever did of what my actual argument was (gleaned like a true historian from the comments that I made on the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship Facebook thread), as well as putting my concerns in a larger scholarly context. Truly, no cloud without a silver lining! http://apholt.com/2016/03/02/defending-western-civilization-an-interview-with-dr-rachel-brown/

We medievalists all know the drill. Somebody in public life says something disparaging about the Middle Ages and we all leap in to insist that either a) Europe in the Middle Ages was actually much more advanced/enlightened/sophisticated than the off-hand comment about people believing the world was flat suggests, or b) yes, absolutely, they're right, medieval Christians were murderous thugs, barbarians of the first order who knew nothing of tolerance or diversity and probably ate babies for breakfast whenever they could get them. Neither answer ever changes the public conversation one iota because everybody knows that whatever Charles Homer Haskins might try to insist about the real Renaissance happening in the twelfth century, there is no getting round the Albigensian Crusade and the massacres of the Jews in the Rhineland  (the former called by the pope, the latter resisted by all the bishops and other leaders of the Church). The more those of us who study the intellectual, insti...

One of my new friends, Paul, who is himself a convert to Catholicism, has been asking me whether I have ever been drawn to convert, given my devotion to the Virgin Mary. Presbyterians, after all, are not particularly famous for their devotion to the Virgin Mary, and even the Episcopalians with whom I now worship have proven amazingly resistant to my pleas that we pay more attention in our liturgy to the Mother of God. Wouldn't I be happier in the Roman Catholic or Orthodox church where Mary is given her appropriate due? You would think, and I often have wondered why Mary chose me, someone who has never even come close to being a Catholic, as her particular servant. Wondered, that is, until this past summer when I realized that I actually was, in spirit, a Presbyterian , and suddenly her great wisdom in choosing me became clear. (I am not trying to be boastful here, she did choose me and will not let me go, even when I have tried to define my academic work in other ways so as not...