10/18/2024 United Kingdom (International Christian Concern) — The University of Nottingham in England has issued a “trigger warning” to students studying various medieval literature, in part because of Christian themes in the texts. The Daily Mail on Sunday discovered the warning through a Freedom of Information Act request. 

The British university warned students that the course “Chaucer and His Contemporaries” contained issues of “violence, mental illness, and expressions of Christian faith.” 

Geoffrey Chaucer, most widely known for writing The Canterbury Tales, was a 14th-century English author and poet whose influence on English literature is on par with William Shakespeare. Chaucer, a Christian, is referred to by some as “the father of English poetry” and is said to have influenced C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. 

A warning label on Chaucer for Christian themes targets Christianity as a whole and calls into question the nature of what is considered dangerous by modern universities. Add to that the threat of miscoloring literature in general, and future literary studies are likely to become tenuous and pulled from the deep waters of contemplation in which they belong. 

According to Frank Furedi, a professor at the University of Kent, placing a trigger warning on Chaucer is a strange phenomenon. 

“Warning students of Chaucer about Christian expressions of faith is weird,” Furedi stated. “The problem is not … student readers of Chaucer but virtue-signaling, [and] ignorant academics.” 

Suppose Christian themes are dangerous, and the University of Nottingham is correct. In that case, labels must be issued to myriad heavyweights in the literary world, including T.S. Eliot, John Donne, and Fyodor Dostoevsky, just to scratch the surface.  

Whether subtle or outright insidious, the grouping of violence and mental disorders with Christianity draws a psychological line between the three as though there was some shared common ground. The warning also draws stealthily close to censoring Christian voices, which continues to elicit concern among Christians and anyone concerned with basic human rights. 

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