In the below interview, I met with Rachel Fulton Brown, associate professor of History at the University of Chicago, regarding her 2017 book Mary and the Art of Prayer: The Hours of the Virgin in Medieval Christian Life and Thought.
Over the course of the interview, we talked about the ancient Temple Tradition and its connection with the Virgin Mary and Christ. We also discussed J.R.R. Tolkien’s works, the psychology of devotion, the problem of portraying sin, the reality of the spiritual, and the re-enchantment of the world (made most obvious in the rhetoric surrounding January 6th).
It is discussions like this that make UChicago so unique. My peers and I are able to interact with the leading minds in the world on almost every subject imaginable. COVID, though, has severely impeded these interactions, cutting students off from the natural times for discussion before and after class.
Please enjoy our delightful romp into what is (in my opinion) an under-appreciated topic in academic circles.
*The views expressed in this article solely represent the views of the author, not the views of the Chicago Thinker.
I’ve been pretty harsh on this website before, but only on articles that I think deserve it. Honestly though, this is pretty good content. This is exactly the kind of thing you should really be doing: exploring ideas, having interesting conversations, and exposing people to concepts and ways of seeing things that they might not otherwise be exposed to.
Frankly, you come off as a lot smarter in your conversation than you do in a lot of your previous articles, which is what happens when you make exploring ideas the objective rather than trying to play a rhetorical game of “gotcha.” A big part of why so many people on campus dislike the Chicago Thinker so much is because most of the articles on this website (including some that you’ve written) dive headfirst into meaningless culture wars and come off as bad-faith pandering clickbait, but this one is, as you call it, a “delightful romp.” If all of the articles on the Chicago Thinker were more like this, maybe it wouldn’t be quite so poorly received on campus anymore. I seriously, honestly encourage you to do more content like this and less content like, well, most of the rest of the content here. If you do, I and other students might actually go from hate-reading this website to unironically reading this website.
I’ll also offer some constructive criticism, because I genuinely want content like this to be encouraged: while the video is nice and all, I come to newspaper websites to read. I would much prefer if the interview was transcribed and put into article form, since I (along with most people) can read a lot faster than you would normally speak in conversation. The video is over an hour and a half long (which is why I only watched the first 1/4 or so, at least so far) and I’d be much more likely to consume the whole thing if it were in text form.