Fencing Bear at Prayer

I have a hard time with trust. It was November 1975. I was ten. Our parents called us into their bedroom. Mom was sitting on the bed, looking sad. Dad was standing beside her. And one or the other of them, I can't remember which, said the words that broke my heart: "Your mother and I...your father says he...we aren't going to be living together anymore." I never saw it coming. Okay, I was ten. Maybe when you're ten you don't notice as much as you do when you are eleven. When I was ten, I believed my parents were happy.  Okay, so Dad worked long hours at the hospital, and we didn't see him much. And he had been away for long periods of time, first, back when I was six, when he was serving as a surgeon for the Air Force stationed in Thailand. (This was the Vietnam war; he became an outstanding trauma surgeon that year.)  Dad was away again the six months before he and Mom called us into their bedroom. He had been down in Gainesville, Florida,...

"Barely literate." "Lesbianic man-hating harpies." "Professor Stuff-Your-Face-With-Froot-Loops." "Hamplanets." "Kid fuckers." "Beta orbiting cucks" (said of male feminists). "Black dude" (said of a woman). "Man in a dress" (said of a transwoman before surgery). "Spineless cunts" (said of older conservatives). "Illiterate fucks" (said of his own staff). "Race-mixing kike faggot" (said of himself). My colleagues at the University of Chicago want you to know that these words are dangerous, particularly when spoken by my Vile Boyfriend, Mr. Milo Yiannopoulos. So dangerous, in fact, that simply writing about how I think his Dangerous Faggot tour of American college campuses has exposed significant tensions in our university culture is--they would insist--cause for serious concern, whether I mention the jokes that he makes or not. Particularly, it would seem, when I do not. ...

Jesus, like Milo, is right about everything. Okay, so Milo has made some mistakes. Okay, a few pretty big ones . But not Jesus. Jesus is right about everything. Especially what it means to serve a master. Whom do you serve? "No one can serve two masters," he told his disciples . "For either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon." Mammon , of course, is a fancy Aramaic word for "money or riches," so we usually take this passage to mean: "You have to choose between serving God or making money." Which is true, but banal. Of course holy people aren't in it for the money; they have higher, more spiritual things on their mind than filthy lucre. Which would seem to let the rest of us off the hook, as it were. As long as we aren't, I don't know, billionaire real-estate developers, we aren't really serving mammon, right? We want just enou...

The chair of my department wanted to talk with me last week. No, I am not going to lose my job. I do have tenure, and at the University of Chicago, we take academic freedom very seriously. Likewise, as a member of the faculty, I am free to express my opinions publicly, even on a blog, as the statement that my chair sent out to the department on our various listserves sought to make clear. In the chair's words: Individual faculty members are entitled to express and publish their opinions on any public issues of concern to them, and when they do so they speak only for themselves. As a faculty body, the Department of History does not endorse or defend the political or personal views expressed by any of its members. Nor as a collectivity does it take critical positions on matters of individual faculty opinion, be they personal or political. Other faculty members are, of course, also free to express their own countering points of view, to criticize or repudiate publicly whatever t...

And you thought the mess I got into for  " Talking Points: Three Cheers for White Men " was bad! For my encore: Read on...

Like Milo, I have been called quite a few names in the past two weeks, although I like to think that mine are special. Because, of course, we're talking academia here. Here are a few of my favorites: "Addled, awful, and plain stupid thinking." "Plain wrong." "Out of this world." "Racist, civilizationist, and theocratic opinions." "Abhorrent views." You can tell these are my fellow academics speaking. They go after my thoughts. Tweaking the devil* [UPDATE: St. Dunstan grabs the Devil by the nose] London, British Library, Additional MS 42130, fol. 54v The Luttrell Psalter Others, commenting more publicly, have gone after my status as a tenured professor. Per  The Guardian : "Rachel Fulton Brown is, believe it or not, an associate professor of medieval history at the University of Chicago...a woman with a graduate degree and academic publications.... Clearly, we can't put [ what she says about Milo ] down to st...

My first interview! Many thanks to the Rev. Dr. Shawn M. Greener for having me on his radio show God in Country: The Collision of Faith and Politics , for a conversation about fencing, prayer, my journey as a medievalist, what I think being conservative means, where Milo fits in this story, and, of course, the Virgin Mary and God. Plus I explain why I am "Entish." Listen here .

Oh , for goodness ' sake ! I like Milo because he is Catholic, conservative, and trying to do good after spending his twenties living riotously and hurting more people than he should--or meant to. I stood up for him this week and all along during his campus tour because he was doing something that nobody else in academia, including myself, would: bring out into the open the things that, in academia as in our culture at large, nobody has been willing to say lest they get shamed, shouted down, and told to shut up. He talks about the things I care about: the problems with gender studies, the importance of Christian virtues, the value of Western civilization, the greatness of America as a country founded on ideals. Yes, he made jokes at the expense of other people, particularly people whom the entire national media and all my liberal friends and colleagues say he shouldn't, but this is part of the point: unless you have been a conservative in academia for the past thirty...