- Feb 5, 2002
- 182,819
- 66,280
- Country
- United States
- Gender
- Female
- Faith
- Catholic
- Marital Status
- Married
- Politics
- US-Others
A Freedom of Information request has exposed the University of Nottingham for issuing trigger warnings to students who have signed up to a module on medieval English literature.
Four authors apparently presented those of a delicate or sensitive disposition with particular threats that required forewarning: Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, John Gower, and Thomas Hoccleve. But what was it that was so dangerous about these poets that required a trigger warning? Two generalities and something very specific: violence, mental illness and, rather more chillingly, expressions of Christian faith.
More people will have read Chaucer than Langland or Hoccleve. And they will know that although Chaucer gets a little bawdy, much to the delight of those who study him as teenagers, there is not much more violence, mental illness (or bawdiness, which seems less of a problem) than you get in some pubs on a Friday night near closing time.
But a trigger warning about Christian faith?
This is an act of ambitious scale. Perhaps as ambitious as it is ignorant and ill-willed.
The best image to describe this might be of a man high up on a tree sawing off the branch on which he is perched, oblivious of its connection to the tree.
Continued below.
catholicherald.co.uk
Four authors apparently presented those of a delicate or sensitive disposition with particular threats that required forewarning: Geoffrey Chaucer, William Langland, John Gower, and Thomas Hoccleve. But what was it that was so dangerous about these poets that required a trigger warning? Two generalities and something very specific: violence, mental illness and, rather more chillingly, expressions of Christian faith.
More people will have read Chaucer than Langland or Hoccleve. And they will know that although Chaucer gets a little bawdy, much to the delight of those who study him as teenagers, there is not much more violence, mental illness (or bawdiness, which seems less of a problem) than you get in some pubs on a Friday night near closing time.
But a trigger warning about Christian faith?
This is an act of ambitious scale. Perhaps as ambitious as it is ignorant and ill-willed.
The best image to describe this might be of a man high up on a tree sawing off the branch on which he is perched, oblivious of its connection to the tree.
Continued below.
The sinister lunacy of ‘trigger warnings’ for the Christian content of Chaucer’s works - Catholic Herald
A Freedom of Information request has exposed the University of Nottingham for issuing trigger warnings to students who have signed up to a module on medieval English literature. Four authors apparently presented those of a delicate or sensitive disposition with particular threats that required...
catholicherald.co.uk
