Sightings Articles
An Open Letter to Rachel Fulton Brown
Dr. Fulton Brown, You were a major influence on my development as an academic and as an educator. I am studying for a doctorate and writing on the history of biblical exegesis in large part because of time spent in your classroom in my seven years...
March 2, 2017
Lessons in False Piety and Fake News from the Middle Ages
In the first novella of Boccaccio’s 14th-century Decameron, Panfilo tells the story of Ciappelletto, the worst man ever to live (including his impressive catalogue of vice), who spins his final confession into a rhetorical masterpiece narrating his o...
March 2, 2017
Three Comments on Rachel Fulton Brown
Of the many misleading statements made by Rachel Fulton Brown, one that struck me as a Berkeley local and indeed a veteran of the Free Speech Movement of 1964 was her representation of the anti-Milo student protesters. They were, she implies, happily...
March 2, 2017
The Time Has Passed
On February 16th, 2017, Sightings published an article entitled “Why Milo Scares Students, and Faculty Even More,” by University of Chicago professor Rachel Fulton Brown. In the piece Fulton Brown theorizes about the discomfort that Milo Yiannopoulos...
March 2, 2017
Mind-Forged Manacles
Professor Rachel Fulton Brown’s February 16th Sightings piece was about freedom of speech, the place of Christianity in Western culture supposedly championed by Milo Yiannopoulos, and the seeming inability of students to make normative judgments. Whi...
March 2, 2017
The Church Militant
Headlines in the Detroit Free Press, which reached us recently via USA Today, and the Chicago Sun-Times, from the second-to-last day of last year, were wake-up alarms alerting readers to yet another extremist group of the sort that prospers in these ...
February 27, 2017
Robinson Jeffers: A Poet for Our Climate
The poets of America’s great Modernist generation—Wallace Stevens, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot—have all had their moments in the sun. Robinson Jeffers, their contemporary, was ultimately overshadowed by them, but his poetry may speak to our moment as no ...
February 23, 2017
Benedict, Not Benedictine
Editor's note: Last Thursday's piece by Rachel Fulton Brown provoked a great deal of discussion. Some of those who have written to express their consternation have urged Sightings to "disavow" the piece and remove it from the Marty Center's "platform...
February 20, 2017
Why Milo Scares Students, and Faculty Even More
Editor's note: For a collection of responses to this piece, please see “A Packet for Rachel Fulton Brown” (March 2, 2017). On Wednesday, February 1st, there was a riot at the University of California, Berkeley. The College Republicans had invited ...