From the Kitchen Table: The Duffys - America's Longest Addiction: The War On Sugar

Episode Date: April 28, 2022

This week, Sean and Rachel sit down with Associate Professor at the University of Chicago Dr. Rachel Fulton Brown to discuss the dangers of sugar addiction. Dr. Fulton Brown explains how many people were trained at a young age that sugary foods can be used as a coping mechanism, and advises listeners on how to fight this addiction despite temptations brought on since childhood. She later discusses how her relationship with God has changed since restricting sugar from her diet. Follow Sean and Rachel on Twitter: @SeanDuffyWI & @RCamposDuffy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Rachel Campos Duffy. Thank you, Sean. And hello, everybody. We are back with more conversations from our kitchen table. And today we have an amazing guest who's written an amazing article about the impact and the influence of sugar. We all talk about sugar, but who knew it had this kind of history. So we brought her on. She's somebody that we know through our daughter. She's a professor at the University of Chicago. And I just she's an associate, I should say, associate professor of history in the Department of History. And I want to describe her the way she describes herself.

She describes herself as a not so mild mannered associate professor of medieval European history, specializing in the study of devotion, prayer, and the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. And actually, my daughter took her class on Tolkien, and it was life-changing for her. So we're going to talk about, gosh, we have a lot of things to talk about with her. So with not any further ado, let me welcome Dr. Rachel Fulton-Brown to the kitchen table. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you both so much for having me. Oh, you know, it's not very often that a Catholic mom like myself sends her daughter off to the University of Chicago, and she ends up meeting a professor who has a specialty

in the devotion to the Virgin Mary. So tell me how that happened. Wait, Mary first, then sugar. Yeah, Mary, talk sugar, Mary, then sugar. Well, the way I tell it in my most recent book on Mary is she told me, right? I had to work on her. I actually grew up Presbyterian, which gave me, as I was growing up, a lifelong interest in Scripture and the interpretation of Scripture. When I was in college, I had wonderful teachers in medieval history and in Latin. And these two things came together in the place that I needed to understand where the devotion to Mary came from because I didn't grow up with it. In retrospect, I keep saying,

it's like Mary was nudging me all along. I needed to seek wisdom. And in my work, I actually concentrate on the scriptural ways in which medieval Christians talk about her, both in the liturgy and in commentaries. And that I see as she chose me as a Presbyterian. I'm not Presbyterian anymore. I became Catholic five years ago. That's her doing too. She needed someone like me to show both Protestants and Catholics that the devotion to Mary is in the Bible, is throughout the Bible, and that we find her through prayer and meditation on the scriptures. You know, it's so interesting to me. I have two co-hosts on my weekend show, and both of them are Protestants. And we both, we all have so much respect for each other and

each other's face and the way we practice it. And the one thing that they seem to be most, and I think it's a very common thing with Protestants, is the thing that most perplexes them is our devotion to Mary. What is the most effective thing that a Catholic could say to a Protestant in explaining that? But that's why I think it's important that I was the one who wrote the books that I did on Mary in the Middle Ages to say Mary's, Protestants are often taught, it's like, well, Mary's not in the scriptures. I'm like, she's in the gospels, right? And the first thing to think about is why is she in the gospels? There's not necessarily any reason for Luke to have written the stories that he did about her or for her to be standing there under the cross, as John describes it, or for her to be at the marriage of Cana and nudging Jesus to work his first miracle, that the earliest Christians put her in the stories about Christ. So, we need

to understand that. And then you start realizing that is what the long tradition was always doing, saying, how do we understand Christ better by meditating on what it meant for him to become incarnate through her? And I keep going from there, but I start with, she's in the scriptures. I mean, it's like you're- Yeah, no, true. Start there. Yeah, that's a great start. That's a great start. So you wrote this interesting article on sugar. Sean, by the way, he's on a health kick, Dr. Brown. He started working out. I mean, I think he looks better now physically than he did

10 years ago. But we've often, it's still working out, but we have often had this conversation, Sean, about sugar and how much sugar should we have? There are a lot of people who, there's sugar buster books and there's a lot of reasons why people say we should eliminate it from our diet. Well, and Dr. Brown, again, I appreciate Rachel's kind comments, but I, so I, I, I got turned on, um, to one of my, from one of my dentist friends who was from key on keto and basically eliminating, eradicating sugar from your diet and then getting kicked into ketosis. And the amount of weight that you lose is phenomenal. I mean, it just, the weight will fall off. But it's really hard to sustain. I think our bodies do need sugar. But what I found was that when I stopped eating sugar, I actually craved sugar less.

But you talk about once you're addicted to sugar, and we're addicted to sugar, you know, from a very young age you never lose the addiction you're always craving it you always want it it's like that that i've never done math before just a fox news alert but i imagine it's like math you always you no matter how clean you are for how long you always want it and yearn for it um so i think yeah you asked me like five questions there and at least they triangulate them um that i think most people come to this meditation on the problem of sugar through diet and through wondering to lose weight i actually first was studying it um for a paper i wrote about 20 years ago on the the the phrase from the psal, taste and see the Lord is sweet. I actually got to this

sort of problem in the academic context because I was obsessed with diet at that point and I was counting on my calories. And we were at a dinner party and one of my friends said something about, you know, you're making everything into this counting thing. And there was a sort of challenge in there. It's like, I'm going to write a paper about prayer and chocolate. And, and I think there was, I think there was also like a, an advert ad for a yoga retreat that had chocolate attached to it. I need to understand this language of, of sweetness and prayer. Well, that took me down, you know, one of those rabbit holes where you find out in the Middle Ages, one, there's much less sugar because what we experience now, I mean, some people think about sugar mainly as, oh, it's a problem because of high fructose corn syrup.

No, it's a problem because sugar at all is in the quantities that we have it. In the Middle Ages, sugar was a spice, right? It was something that was incredibly rare. It was very, very expensive. And it was understood as a medicine, right? If you see it described in medieval cooking treatises and stuff, you sprinkle it on food for the sick, right? It is a medicine. So, I think starting there, starting with this understanding that in its earliest uses, people understood it as a drug, you know, a healing thing, rather than as food. Then you start getting some of the bigger context that I was pointing to in the blog post, right? So, there's a long history in here, but the first is in the Middle Ages. They think of things like almonds as sweet, right? And in my article, I got to the end of it and

said, you know, wouldn't it be amazing if now we talked about God in the way in which medieval Christians talked about him as, you know, like you pray the Ave Maria regularly and you end up with the sensation of sweetness in your mouth, right? Well, the sweetness is like honey. It's amazing. It's intoxicating. You realize they're, they're describing something incredibly powerful. And if, if you put it in terms like, oh, it's like taking, you know, psilocybin, right? You're, you're tripping on mushrooms or something. Then you realize that they mean that this is an incredibly powerful substance. So the sugar is, or the sweetness is, and we have gotten so used to it that I think it's like when you get addicted

to powerful drugs, you have to keep taking more and more of them because you can't get a high anymore. Right. Which is why something like almonds seems sweet, right? But to most Americans, almonds would not seem sweet because their idea of sweet is like way more sweet than that. Correct? Right. And that's where I got to at the end of the article 20 years ago. It's like, we've lost our taste for God because we're sort of overwhelmed with the sweetness rather than it being something rare. Then I also, in the blog, I point to the fact that I've written about this off and on for some time now. And I did go through the keto Aitken's diet experience, finding out that yes, if you cut back on the carbs and the sugar,

you lose weight a lot very quickly. But I think when you're doing it simply as a physical deprivation, then you don't fight the actual addiction because you don't fight the ritual contexts that you're used to finding the sugar in. And this is what I pointed to in the blog post. You don't get to the actual spiritual temptation, difficulty that you've set yourself up for with this, what I will call an addiction. I think it's appropriate to call it an addiction.

But you have to recognize it's not just a physical addiction. It's a ritual and spiritual sort of complex that we've given ourselves. And you think about all of the places that we have sugar in our celebrations. It's like you can't have a birthday without cake. You can't have Christmas without cookies. You can't have Easter without chocolate eggs, right? That we've spiritually bound ourselves with this intoxicant to such an extent that I think you're going to get triggered by those sorts of situations because it's very, very difficult for us to have the celebration without the sugar attached. So first, let me tell our listeners that you have a blog called Fencing Bear at Prayer, which is very good. And that's where people can get this article that you wrote about sugar.

And it's called Confessions of a New World Sugar Eater. So I'll tell you, Dr. Brown, so I like sugar. I'm a dessert person. I like that there are birth... When Sean was on keto, I found it super annoying because I do associate celebrating with, you know, cake.

And I do feel like we, you know, even if you've noticed when during Lent, we, you know, give up, you know, we fast and we give up treats, for example, if that's what you gave up at Lent. But then on Sunday, you're allowed to have that thing because it's a feast day. And so I do associate it with happiness and good things. Tell me why I shouldn't. I know you don't like two-part questions, but I'm going to ask you this too. Better than five-part questions.

Mainly that I'm going to keep talking forever if you ask me. I'll leave a memory. I want to get to that. I want to get to why that's a bad thing. But also I want to get to the history, because this is what I really enjoyed about your article is I had never thought about the history of sugar and its negative involvements, obviously, in the slave. I never even it never. I mean, I'm just eating sugar. I'm not thinking about it, but it has a connection to this great evil of the slave trade.

It definitely does. And that's, so they're actually, those two parts actually fit together in my meditation because you're mentioning Lent that I say I'm relatively new Catholic, although I've been studying the history of Christianity for a very long time. And last year, I was reading Don Prosper Guéranger's Liturgical Year, which it's a multi-volume, 15-volume meditation on all of the different, you know, observances that we have in the Christian calendar. And his volume five on Lent was the one that startled me most because he was talking about the reason for our loss of faith

is that people won't fast. And he's writing this in the 19th century. It's not something more recent. It's in the 19th century saying people are falling away from Christianity because we have all these dispensations and nobody's fasting properly. And so, this year when I came around to Lent, I said, okay, I need to fast, but I need to understand why he would say, it's not just about losing weight or being healthy. It's our spiritual crisis comes from the fact that we won't fast. And I'm not quite sure why I realized I needed to test it on sugar this time, but I say, okay, this is not me trying to lose weight. This is not me worrying about my health. This is me paying attention to my spiritual state when I'm not eating the sugar. And that's where I got

to the understanding that the temptations that you're having, and people can talk about this biologically, right? It's your sugar, it's your gut biome, or it's your insulin response, or it's, you know, something else like that, neurotransmitters. If you pay attention to the kinds of thoughts you have when you're low on your usual sugar, they're really negative. Right. And, and they're the kinds of things that you realize you probably were given a bit of sugar when you were growing up to not feel right. It's like, oh, I'm feeling sad. Nobody likes me. I don't have any friends. Oh, here, have a sweet, right? And then I started understanding it's not just that we've tied sugar up with our celebrations. We do use sugar also to

protect ourselves from trauma. And this is where it ties in horrifically with the actual history of sugar, right? Because I got my history of sugar there from Sidney Mintz's book, Sweetness and Power, which is, it's a very famous anthropological study of the history of sugar production. But he shows that the English, and there's layers here, but the English start both the slave trade and this industrial production of sugar. And together, that slave production of sugar down there in the Caribbean islands with pirates fuels the Industrial Revolution. And I put these two things together. It's like the Industrial Revolution is very traumatic for the working class. I mean, it invents the working class as a proletariat. What's curious about the English experience, the British experience

about the Industrial Revolution, one, they start it, right? The mass industry that we think of is really the British. Two, in the mid-19th century, and this is very, very curious, they don't have a workers' revolution. Everybody else does in 1848, right? Governments across Europe are overthrown. And the usual story is, you know, Communist Manifesto is published in 1848, right? Governments across Europe are overthrown. And the usual story is communist manifestos published in 1848, February. There's this cascade of revolutions. Maybe it's the telegraph feeding them all. There's a media moment there. But the English don't.

And I was thinking about that and thinking about what Mintz says about how the working class of Britain, it's given more and more and more sugar. says about how the working class of Britain, it's given more and more and more sugar, so much so that by the end of the century, by the end of the 19th century, poorer families will forego actual food for the sake of sugar. That's an addiction. And it's like people that will buy alcohol or buy cigarettes rather than actual food. And I think the, you know, if you think about the places that we have sugar in our, I mean, there's the happy things, right. But it's also given, it's all so highly ritualized, right. English tea, that you have tea and sugar and that anything that you're, you're ritualizing to that effect has some powerful psychosomatic effect, I think is, is the point here. So, yeah, I ended up with him at the end of the blog

post. I say, you know, now what do you think? But I bet you still want something sweet, right? So to say that we've really, you know, we'd say buried deep in our civilization by this point. We're right there. We'll have more of this conversation next. At Desjardins, we speak business. We speak equipment modernization. We're fluent in data digitization and expansion into foreign markets. And we can talk all day about streamlining manufacturing processes. Because at Desjardins Business, we speak the same language you do, business. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us and contact Desjardins today.

We'd love to talk business. So, Doctor, when you talk about the history of sugar, but also how sweetness goes back to faith, when you gave up sugar, did you experience any effect on your spirituality or on your faith? Well, I'd say I'm still in the process of training myself against the sugar. I see my faith as, it's funny because I've done a lot of conversations in the last few years about my conversion, and I have never had one of these giant clashes, right? It's like the person who studies mysticism never gets to have the mystical experience, I suppose. It's always just been with me. And so, I'd say what my faith gives me is the ground to test this stuff against, right? Because this is a pretty destabilizing thought, right? The Anglosphere is fueled by slavery and sugar.

That's not a happy place to be. No. And so I'd say, you know, where my faith goes is, well, what is our ground? What kind of, where can we look in the end if we say the kinds of institutions that we as conservatives, as Americans, as Catholics have been grounded in, where can we look? Where can we look? Well, obviously the cross, right? And there is a way in which another layer of the meditation that I've been doing, some of my friends and i we have this long long ongoing poetry project that we've done a satire on modeled on alexander

post dunciad which was making fun of modernity uh we did a children's poem last year that is a christian mystical poem on the liturgy right and then we realized we needed to do the real horror poem on the sort of the descent of modernity into this magical thinking. And this is, I say, where our answer comes, right? The poem is called Draco Alchemicus, the alchemical dragon, and the alchemy comes out of the Elizabethan period, right? So, we're modeling it on the fairy queen. What is the title character? Is it the dragon of science and industry and drug addiction and such, the alchemical dragon? Or, and this is the twinning in the poem and the problem, is it in fact the brazen serpent lifted up in the desert upon whom we look and are healed,

which means the real alchemical dragon, the real medicine that we have is our Lord who's lifted up on the cross for our salvation. So if you say that's my faith, that's been there, but this meditation on the sugar helped me really anchor that. What is your culture that has so many addictions, right? I mean, it's interesting, you brought up how you're you sort of hypothesize that perhaps that, that the workers didn't revolt in, you know, England, because they were, I guess, pacified by, you know, all the sugar. Some people say that that's what pot is nowadays, that it's sort of like keeping people from, you know, rising up because, I mean, pot is everywhere. And, but, but there's addiction to, to so many things, to just food in general.

And I, I totally agree with you when you say that it is, you know, it's sort of when people have emotional issues and trauma that, I mean, if you watch any documentary about people who are, you know, severely obese, it's always that they have some trauma that they're, they're literally feeding themselves. So what's the lesson for us as a culture and what you've learned about sugar, about the sugar addiction and, and are. You talk so much about modernity, having these flaws. What can we learn from all of this? Well, we must turn to Christ. There's consolations on this throughout. I mean, one is that we have our brazen serpent, we have our alchemical dragon. We have the medicine that we need, which is our Lord. This is not new. I mean, to say that, you know, it's modernity, it's civilization. Well,

you know, these challenges and addictions have been with us since history. And the, you know, the alchemy is a particularly modern form of this, that from the 16th and 17th centuries, we've been committed to this scientific revolution of transforming matter through all of these experiments and alchemical processes and such like that. That is the same kind of temptation that, for example, in antiquity is said to have been the temptation that encouraged the building of the Tower of Babel, right? So, it's not so much that we are in this uniquely sinful moment. This is what human sin is like, that we get attached to the desire to control everything, right? It's the original serpent's temptation, you will be like gods. And it's the same struggle. So, we can, I mean, the good thing is we can actually learn from our long Christian tradition how to train ourselves in this sort of spiritual

battle. And that's what I also say with my online practices and with my poets and so forth. Just as in the first century century or first, second, third century, the monks go out into the desert in Egypt to fight the demons, you know, at St. Anthony and the demons. We are online in the internet and in this media world now, we train here too. So it's not so much that modernity is the problem. This is our particular version of the challenge that sin gives us. Right. But there was more fasting and there was more discipline, it seemed like, before. Right. And we've lost that. Is that the point? Right. And that's I mean, that was what Dom Gu concern that we have as Christians, we need to go back to fasting and prayer and understand the fasting as this recognizing when we're tempted to comfort ourselves in ways that will then pull us away from Christ.

away from Christ. Is there, is there something, some brilliance to this in, in, in, in how God made us? Because these things that are so wonderful, like coffee, like sugar, like nicotine, like whatever your thing is, it's not like he made kale and spinach, like the most delicious, you know, things that we crave. He made these things that actually in a small dose are, you know, are really good, but in big doses are very damaging. And that we have now this, this, this requirement to kind of go, Hey, you have to, you have to abstain. You have to have discipline. You have to stay away from these wonderful things that put on your planet that I created for you actually can be very bad for you. Well, and what I like is that it brings me back to where I started, which was thinking about

taste and see the Lord is sweet, right? It's in the psalm. And to get to that point, the reason that you need to fast and pray is for that, to get to the point where we taste God again. And we're not drowning our spiritual senses in the physical. And that's what I said. I started my Lent with this. I need to understand why fasting matters so much and not worry about it as this health practice of my body. Although it does help. And I did lose weight. I had had the experience with the keto that it doesn't take the cravings away. And so if you're on eightkins, you buy all their candy bars, which are okay, low carbs, but they're still feeding the sweet. I think the fasting was given to us so that we understand what it means to taste God. And if we use all of the lovely things that he's given us,

but turn our sight away from him, we are missing out on something even sweeter, which is the Lord. Yeah. This is such a great lesson for me because I am guilty of that. I think as I've gotten older and had to like, think about my weight, I have used Lent as a way, it's sort of like as a way to force me into, you know, doing things nutritionally or diet wise, instead of focusing on the spiritual end of it. And we all would be better if we actually did that. I think it's a really great point. And also this idea of removing things so that we're only left with God. And then as you said, we can taste his sweetness instead of sort of the artificial sweetness of all these other things in our life that we use to replace the comfort that we should actually be getting

from God. I think it's an excellent article for everybody who, again, you can go to Dr. Brown's blog post and it's Fencing Bear at Prayer. By the way, can you tell us what that means before we move on to education here? Sure. So I started the blog in 2008 when I was learning defense. I've been fencing for about five years. And I mentioned the monks going out into the desert to train against the demons, right? Medieval monks use many military metaphors that they get from the Psalms, right? The Psalms are very battle-ready repertoire. Psalms, right? The Psalms are very battle-ready repertoire. And you can tell from me, I like practicing, right? If I'm going to figure out something spiritual, I need to understand the

practice. And I had gone to a conference that was talking about metaphors of battle and training manuals and stuff. Anyway, the metaphor led me to actually want to learn defense. And then learning defense taught me about the training that I needed spiritually, in fact, in order to fence well, but then I started writing about it on the blog. And so it's literally fencing bear, right? I am a fencer, like competitive sport fencer. And at prayer was what spiritual lessons do I get from that sport practice? Prayer was what spiritual lessons do I get from that sport practice? I love it. Well, you know, there is so much, like we talk about the rosary as, you know, our armor,

our protection against the devil. There is a lot of sort of military type metaphors when it comes to prayer. And I love that. So Fencing Bear at Prayer. And the article, for those of you who want to read it, is Confessions of a New World Sugar Eater. And it is up on my Twitter. Or you can go to Dr. Fulton Brown's Twitter handle as well. Which, you know, Twitter's free now, I guess. It's not being censored, or we hope.

So that's a good place to go and get this. I want to move on to education because Sean and I just want to know what it, we know what it's like to be a conservative student at the University of Chicago, because we have our daughter Revita and she's had some, some, some, some very difficult experiences there being a conservative, but what's it like to be a professor? And I know you're tenured, Dr. Brown. So maybe you want to tell me what it was like before and after tenure. I've been tenured for quite a while. So before tenure, I hope I was still as courageous as I am now. The first time I actually ended up in the public eye was immediately after I'd gotten tenure when, I mean, my tenure review was autumn 2001, which was a fraught moment in our national history, as well as my own personal history. And I remember the day I sent my book off to the press was actually September 11th,

2001. So I was very conscious of that. And I remember being very happy in the sense that I'm doing something that really is about civilizations and saving civilization. And in that sense, my early teaching at Chicago was in the history of Western civilization core sequence. We have these cycles of civilization sequences, and mine was the Western one. Immediately after I got tenure, for a lot of complicated curricular reasons and staffing reasons, we changed the name of the sequence from history of Western civilization to history of European civilization, which I actually thought was a good change because it describes our course more accurately. But this attracted the attention of some of the alumni who considered that I was therefore destroying Western civilization. The irony of this has never been lost on me, that I was, in fact, I was trying to keep our faculty teaching this course and figuring out a way that we could work together.

The faculty at Chicago, we do these group things. And so there was an article about me back in the Chronicle of Higher Education back in 2002 when that blew up. you know, battles over culture erupted 20 years later, effectively, almost 20 years later, I had a little bit of practice at what kind, what it felt like to be suddenly in the, in the middle of one of these. And I did a blog, I did a blog post on my blog back in 2016, when it first erupted around me called blogging with tenure, which was saying that I have tenure. This is what my job is, which is to speak the truth. And this was before my friendship with Milo Yiannopoulos, right? I'd written something about chivalry and that got some medievalists concerned. And I was saying, of course, I'm going to speak up and write about things and say what I think is true. That is literally my

job. And if you wonder why I can do this with tenure, why would you, why would we need tenure at all? And if I had tenure was so worried about losing it that I didn't speak, then I'm dirt. Right. And I said that at the end of that, that blog, um, that was in 20, that was in winter, 2016. And I've continued to be more and more in a public with some public attention since then, you know, through, it's been, each year has been different, right? And, I mean, what's been interesting is, in fact, each year has been different because these arguments, there's a similar quality to them, but the particulars have changed over the last several years, so that each time we seem to be fighting something different.

But the main thing is, and I put this in another of the posts called How to Be a Happy Warrior, is to recognize that no matter what comes at you, it's a gift. And I have tried to teach Evita and her friends with the Chicago Thinker this. Anytime you are challenged or attacked or brought to the public attention, that's your moment. You can now make your argument. This is your offenser, right? You cannot have a bout unless you have an opponent. You respect your opponent. You salute them for bringing up the topic and you do it respectfully. And I am beyond, I'm sure as her parents, you are very proud of her. But as their professor, I'm immensely proud of Vita and her friends for understanding

that that was what they were being given, right? That the thinker had this amazing moment to be able to speak well, and they have. So I don't, I mean, what is it like for me at Chicago? I get to have students like her. It's wonderful. We'll be back with much more after this. Your teen requested a ride, but this time not from you. It's through their Uber teen account. It's an Uber account that allows your teen to request a ride under your supervision with live trip tracking and highly rated drivers.

Add your team to your Uber account today. So, just by the way, the Thinker is the Chicago Thinker. It's a more conservative paper on campus that was started a couple of years ago. And Professor Fulton Brown is the the guiding light, the professor that assists the kids as they're writing this paper, writing their paper. And but, Professor, as I look at the universities and the woke vocation of America, have you seen a progression of. Have you seen a progression of more leftists on campus? Do you feel like there's a good balance today? I would say that I don't think there is in America, academia, not a balance of left and right and challenging thought and free speech. Again, maybe I'm giving you a five-part question again, but have you seen a progression in the last 20 years from what it was 20 years ago versus what it is today? What about even just the last six or 10 years? Yes, it's different. It's very different. And I've actually spent this past year thinking fairly hard about this, exactly why has it changed so much and obviously so fast. And it is literally the media. And I'd say this is one of the advantages that I have as a medieval historian. I'm used to being

on the losing side of the rhetoric, right? The Enlightenment did us in from the beginning. Although that's actually a 19th century term for the 18th century, but that claim that with whatever the age of reason, we end up with a better world, that's been a psyop, as we like to say, since the 18th century, because it was accompanying an attack on the church and other things. But as a scholar, right, the thing that comes out of the 18th and 19th century in European history is this conviction that the Middle Ages were the Dark Ages, right? And, you know, as a professional scholar in that, who researches that period, you say, no, no, that's the origin of European civilization.

There's all these good things that come out of it, but it never goes away. Again, there's lots of blog posts on the blog. There's a big archive there. And one of them I did was in the middle of a few years ago, one of the social media moments, make the middle ages dark again. And it's a satire on, oh, we've been trying for a century to explain to people why in fact, the middle ages and the 12th century particularly are a great time. And no, no, no, it's still this dark age where, you know, wizards are blowing up buildings with gunpowder, a la Mark Twain and the Connecticut Yankee and King Arthur's Court. One of the things that one of the strengths that I get as a medievalist is having to pay attention to the transition from the medieval to the early modern and what drives it, right? And one of the absolutely critical things is the printing press, obviously, right?

The transition from manuscript to print. The printing press drove Europe nuts, right? We talk about it's the age of the religious wars. It's the age of the exploration. It's the scientific revolution. the religious wars, it's the age of the exploration, it's the scientific revolution. What's going on is an enormous crisis of authority, of politics, of religiosity, of the individual self, and so forth. That was the printing press. Now look what we're living through, right? And the 19th century, I mentioned sugar in 1848. I also alluded to the telegraph,

right? From the 19th century, we've been going through an equally massive change with electric media, right? For the telegraph, photographs, radio, television, movies, and so forth. We've gone through yet another giant transformation in our lifetime, right? Gen Xers, right? Of the introduction of the digital. And I think what we've experienced in the last decade, and it's obviously like I was blogging from 2008, I got on Facebook in 2009. This past decade has been the decade of this social media. And what we're learning is the spiritual and emotional challenges of being in that, in that media format, right. Which has clearly been very traumatic for all of us. And I'd say,

whether we call it left or right, the, the, the media experience is like going into the desert and fighting demons. And I can elaborate on that. Yes. I think that's a great description. on that. Yes. I think that's a great description. It's literally fighting demons because we're dealing with disincarnate intelligences, right? And you mentioned Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter. One of the things he said he's going to do is verify the humans, right? You can't verify humans in the digital world, right? What you have is digital, 010101, right? It's electronic bits traveling however they travel in the media, right? And I mean, Twitter became the kind of social space that it did because you could have all those anonymous accounts. And it also obviously

fed in certain things like the swarming and such like that. But this kind of media environment that we're in now, you could say we should just leave it and go into the desert and live as monks. But the odd thing about the Desert Fathers is they didn't go into the desert to run away from the demons. They went into the desert. This is in the second, third century, right? The early fathers. They went into the desert because that's where the demons were, right? St. Anthony goes into the desert to train against these intelligences, right? These temptations and intelligences. Call me too much of an optimistic Christian, but we are in the internet now.

People are listening to this podcast now. We need to train our souls to deal with this media. Yeah, I agree. I agree. We can't be like, you know, there's a lot of Christian families that go, no, no social media, no phones. I'm very concerned about my kids with social media, Dr. Brown. We've seen, I mean, you could see, by the way, mental health just literally, you know, they have like polling and all kinds of stats and social media arrives and the mental health of children just starts to decline. So these are very serious things that we're talking about. But I don't think that at this point, we can absolutely say we're going to be out of it. I mean, I'm glad that

for example, your blog is there that people can access it. There are good things that can be done, but there's a lot of bad stuff too. And how do you help children, especially to navigate this very dangerous space? Exactly. And I mean, it's our sugar. It's another of these addictions. Yes. And certainly, I've been on social media enough, as you say, I've practiced it. I went into the desert and found out what it was like to be not so much on Twitter. I haven't used that one as actively, but, you know, Facebook. And then I've been on Telegram for the last several years. That's where, you know, we're using Telegram as the app to write this poetry.

Right. So it's this alchemic, we hope alchemical or spiritual transformation of what could be, and sometimes is a very distressing environment. But we, I mean, we as Christians, it's like, again, Jesus came into the world, he became incarnate, he came into the world to carry all of our sins, and we follow him, we model ourselves on him. And that incarnational reality includes these temptations. Yes. You mentioned the printing press, the radio, TV. We've had all these communication innovations that have taken place over the centuries. Is there any lessons learned on how societies have navigated in the past these innovations? Obviously, I'd never thought about the printing press, but you're right. That was revolutionary in the way that you could communicate with the masses.

Do we learn anything from that moment that could help us through this moment? Because, again, I think, one, for our kids, it's challenging. I just think for the public discourse, I served in Congress for nine years. And what someone will say on social media, and oftentimes it can be almost as painful for people to hear the criticism. Rachel and I both have thick skins, I think, like you, Doctor. But they would never say that to someone's face. you doctor, but they would never say that to someone's face. The anonymity or the removal allows people to actually say things, right? The human connection is gone and therefore you can say these nasty, horrible things that I think good people are saying them. And they would never say that to someone's face, but they'll say it online and kind of do the same kind of damage with the words and the concepts that are communicated.

Yes. I, I not kidding when I say it's hell. And, and I actually, I did a little post on that called Corona Virgenus, um, where I was meditating on being kicked out of a conference. I have had some, I obviously not had only happy moments, right. I was kicked off an entire conference panel that was supposed to be out in heaven. As it turned out, the conference didn't meet at all. Nobody got to do it because it was supposed to be held in March, 2020. But, you know, I was meditating on this, this problem. What is it like in this social media world?

I was kicked off. We were kicked out of this panel because of the kinds of things they were worried about. It was going to be in Berkeley. They were worried about me being there. And I'm like, really me? People want me? Talking about Mary is queen of heaven. Are you kidding me? That's dangerous. That's dangerous all by itself. But I was reading an article about kinds of comedy, right? And Dante comes into this, right? Describing hell as this place of demons, right? And the demonic is this place of no bodies, right? Because in hell, they're just, well, in Dante's version, there's still shades and the resurrection

hasn't happened yet. So, they're not bodies yet, but they're being tormented as, as, as souls, just as, as these shades and it's all disincarnate. And I said, this is a perfect, this is the most perfect description I've seen of the internet. So what Sean, what you're saying is it's the way people behave as if there is no consequence to their being nasty to each other. As you would say, they would be bounded somewhat more if they were having to say this to people's face in our incarnate world. So no, I take that quite seriously as a danger. There was a question there, what do we do about it? But again, I'd say going back to another- What he said, Dr. Brown, was what he asked was, is there something we can learn from the,

from these other disruptions? You know? Yes. Okay. You know, the, the, the printing press and others that we can learn for,

for, for dealing with the internet. Oh, well, yes, you have to be wary because they cause wars. Right. No,

it's, it's, it's when you suddenly realize the telegraph 1848 the american civil war um the the you know the the international the the the speed up of communications one of my friends was saying recently photographs also help you know fuel the civil war, our civil war radio, mass, mass media, that's the wars of the 20th century. Right. So it's terrible danger. It's real, real crisis danger that the media can capture our sinful nature and put us into these frenzies. But again, the, the, the digital media with Ukraine, no question about it. We're seeing that with Ukraine. Yep.

And we can see the opposite, too. I mean, I think some of the images, the photographs in particular that came out during the Vietnam period, I think in some ways helped to end that war for better or worse, however people feel about that. But I think those images were difficult for Americans to process and they just wanted to end. So it could have that effect as well, I guess. Yes, I think so. I think, and that's it. We don't get to run away from it because this is, you know, this is our life and we are incarnate. And, you know, I, I've been for Good Friday, I watched Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ. I love that movie. Which I say, seen as a Catholic, it was much more meaningful.

Yeah, isn't that true? And that I recognize it as the stations and the meditation there. But he's using film, which you could say is a terribly dangerous medium, right? But Gibson, in that one, in Apocalypto, in so many of his movies, he's understanding the challenges of the medium to give a Christian message. So I think we need to, as Christians, learn what the dangers are of the media. But if we do art, I mean, we're Catholics. We also have art and music and stories and liturgy that we need to understand where these media can be used in praise of God as opposed to feeding them the demons.

I think that's so true. Dr. Brown, I want to read this because not a lot of parents out there are going to be as lucky as Sean and I to have their daughter go to a university as liberal as University of Chicago and end up with a Professor Brown. You write, I am the professor your other professors warned you about. I love Christianity, America, and the Western tradition of theology, art, philosophy, music, letters, and education. I believe in the reality of truth, beauty, goodness, and love. I teach history as an exercise in empathy, rethinking the thoughts of the past so as to shed light on our common humanity.

I judge people by what they say and do, not by what others say about them. I worship Jesus Christ as Lord and honor Mary as the mother of God. So, okay. So I just love you. I love that you are, have intersected into my daughter's life. I want you to give, you know, as we close out here on this podcast, I want you to give parents some advice as they send their children off to college, because I do think we need to become better consumers of education. I think it's serendipitous because that my daughter got to encounter you. It was through a bad experience she had of being attacked and vilified at the University of Chicago that you reached out to her. I don't know if she would have encountered you otherwise.

Maybe she would have. She loved your classes that she did take with you. Maybe she would have. She loved your classes that she did take with you. But what should parents think about as they help guide their children in this next step and going into a university? because of the media moment that we're living through that my teaching has changed over my career vastly, right? Because now that things are digital, you have access to the whole of human history immediately through your iPad, right? And images and stories. We are in this transformative moment with videos and podcasts. I've done a lot of teaching online in the last few years, both in my own video series and in interviews and so forth. I think what I try to teach my own students, and Avita may have talked to you about this, you're sort of navigating between

two worlds, right? You need the training that we give in higher education if you want to do certain kinds of intellectual work, right? But you also have enormous opportunities, right? Evita and her friends started the Chicago Thinker as an independent online news magazine, right, and opinions and such. What I hope I'm doing in my teaching, and Evita took my Tolkien course, right, that I encourage them both to think of their scholarship as creative work and their creative work as, as part of the academic thing that they're trying to learn and transform there. So I say, you know I think you probably, my, my, my most like blunt advice is

wear your cross, mark yourself as a Christian and don't back down. And that was actually one of my very first spiritual disciplines on campus, right? It's like I started wearing a cross necklace, a big gemmed one, right? The one I wear now is a little more modest, but I still definitely make sure I wear it because you want to say, I am Christ. I am here. I am Christ. I'm in the public sphere. And then recognize the challenges and the opportunities. Don't let people bully you. Don't ever apologize for being Christian. Not for a second, right? We have the truth and the joy and the love, and we have nothing to apologize for. I hope that if we can keep saying that to our students, to our children, we'll bring our joy into the public sphere again, rather than feeling like there's literally nothing for us to apologize. We are the ones that stand under the cross. That's such a great point. And I also think in this time frame when your words are violence, evaporated. And now even the conversation to say what you're saying is like

you're an extremist on many college campuses. How do you navigate? I don't know if you get any pushback from other students or from professors, but you're pretty frank about what you believe. Rachel and I are pretty frank about what we believe. How do you navigate the pushback that you get, the hate that you get, the efforts to silence these very common sense viewpoints? How do you navigate it? You turn the other cheek. And what I realized about that was,

it's like you're describing, Sean, you're describing the hysterical responses and the fury and the shaming. And Evita got that in the online context. You stand calmly. You turn the other cheek. You don't let them get you angry because they're afraid. Right. These kinds of responses are fear of Christ.

Right. And you just don't you don't get angry back because you don't need to, there's nothing there. And my general experience at Chicago, it's like people do ask me, it's like what it's like, and I'm like, I smile and say, you know, I mean, I can do this as a woman. I think men have to use slightly different rhetorical gestures, right? But I say, well, you know, look at the trouble I've gotten into now. And most of the time, my colleagues say, okay, she's not going to be frightening to me. I can talk to them right now.

They may say things behind my back and they have, and I know that, but they said a lot of things about Christ. So I, or Our Lady, right? If he could take it, surely I can take this. That's why watching The Passion of the Christ was, you know, remind yourself of what he suffered for us. And then if they're upset with you, most of the time, if they don't get a reaction, they'll go away. I think that's right. And I think that to, to, to, when you speak the truth, never apologize and never shut up is, and I've had, I, I said something on a different network than the one that I work for now. And I was right on it and I was getting a lot of pressure and I

apologize for it. And it's one of the great regrets I have. Never apologize for, for something that you say that is truthful. We all make mistakes and say things that might be too harsh or mean or wrong. Apologize for those things. But when you're speaking the truth, never apologize to anybody. And to your point, don't be quiet. Don't be silenced. Continue to speak out and be a light of truth to all those that you come into contact with. I think you are that. I think you're a happy warrior, Dr. Fulton Brown. You're a great example to so many people. By the way, I love the context and just the large frame of reference that you bring to modern conversations. I think the fact that you have this background in medieval history, one of my favorite things that you wrote was about chivalry and how much we owe to Western civilization and to that time period in particular to how women are treated.

It's very different than other parts of the world, and it's very unique to Western civilization. I think you have this kind of deep knowledge and this ability to reach back into history and inform what we're doing here in postmodern times. and inform what we're doing here in postmodern times. And I think that it's enlightening, it's encouraging, it's inspiring. And I think that I really wish I had a professor like you when I was in college, but I have to say I feel even more blessed that my daughter had the opportunity to get to know you. I know that she's deeply, deeply influenced by her relationship with you. And you've just been an enormously positive force in her life and are helping her direct her life in ways probably that you don't even know,

don't even know, right? Not on some level, but on such deep levels. And I also really admire that you see your scholarship and your spiritual life as that they're not in conflict, that they come together. And that's another great, great example. I want to give you a last word here before we go that you might want to tell our, our listeners. Again, I encourage everyone to go to her blog, to read this article as well. And it's, it's really great stuff. I've, I've found myself just reading one and then another. I just, I think you're. Oh, thank you. I'm not sure what to say after that. So thank you very much. I thinking that where you're across and recognize that we're the salt of the earth. Right. And it's like, without us, everybody dies. Right. Yeah. It's like the salt is what keeps our bodies alive. You need some salt with the sugar. Right. You need some salt and a little bit of salt can have an enormous effect. So don't despair.

Yeah. Dr. Fulton Brown from the University of Chicago. Thank you so much for joining us at our kitchen table. I'm looking forward to a day when you can join us for not a virtual cup of coffee, but since we're humans, we could actually sit down and have a real cup of coffee together at our kitchen table one day. I'd like that. I'm addicted, Dr. Brown, so I'll have three cups of coffee. He's addicted to coffee, not sugar. I'm okay with that. Wonderful. Thanks for joining us. We appreciate it. Well, that was a great conversation with Dr. Brown. Don't you wish you had someone like her,

Sean, when you were in college? A hundred percent. It was interesting how she weaves all these concepts back to faith. It was fascinating and so enjoyable to listen to her. Yeah, I always love talking to converts too, to Catholicism. They bring a new perspective. There's a lot of things that us sort of born Catholics take for granted that converts to Catholic can see things in a different way and appreciate them in a different way. What a blessing to have her on the show. What a blessing to have her as part of our daughter's life. And we're going to get to see her, Sean. She's actually

RSVP'd. She's coming to the wedding. So for Avita's wedding in June. You know, during the conversation, you know what I actually thought this is like the father part coming out. I'm like, I was, I get so frustrated when I write my check to the university of Chicago that helps me to go. I'm like, you know what? Maybe I don't feel so bad having her there and the influence that she's put on our, on our daughter. I don't feel so bad on all those checks that I've written to that institution. Yeah. She's definitely made it worthwhile. And actually I have to give Chicago credit that they have someone with her background,

with her very open thoughts about faith, about religion and Western civilization and America. I think it's a testament to some of the diversity that does actually exist at the University of Chicago for all that we complain about it, Sean, that they did give tenure to Dr. Fulton Brown and they deserve credit for that. So I want to thank Dr. Brown for joining us and for all of you for joining us at our kitchen table. We've enjoyed the conversation. We hope to see you next week. If you enjoyed this conversation, let us know. Subscribe, rate, review this podcast at foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you download podcasts. And we hope to see you around the kitchen table.

Have a great week. From the Fox News Podcasts Network. In these ever-changing times, you can rely on Fox News for hourly updates for the very latest news and information on your time. Listen and download now at foxnewspodcast.com or wherever you get your favorite podcasts.