“In Praise of Folly” Audrey Elisa Kerr(bio) I wrote this piece while a Coolidge Fellow at Auburn Theological Seminary during Summer 2013. I applied to be a fellow in the face of my own closeted circumstances: I am a career academic and a single mother, and the two are, more often than not, uncomplimentary institutions. Almost immediately after accepting the invitation, a nebulous feeling of deceit clouded every corner of the mere 70‐mile journey from Connecticut to New York. First there was the apologetic search for family housing. Then, upon arrival, the squirreling away of time commenced: I worked under the bathroom light outside the room where the children slept while others, I imagine, partook in “after research” drinks at swanky, Upper West side night spots. Also, there was the hush, hush voice in my mind that refrained endlessly: single parenting and scholarship can co‐exist, could co‐exist, might co‐exist, will co‐exist. And I almost believed it. But being back in New York among my old friends—most of whom are male, tenured faculty at Columbia—my domestic conundrum was only exaggerated by their blithe, slouchy, intellectual postures. From where I stand, it seems they haven't even the most abstract concept of how prized time is. Lips heavy with definitive pronouncements, they all look like bronze oil tycoons returning from holiday in the South of France. I look milk‐stained and sweaty. As I sat with these tensions, my desire to write about motherhood arose. This particular essay was inspired by a conversation with Jake Goodman, one of the fellows’ “mentors,” who suggested to me that the state in which I allowed my public and intellectual life to reside in relation to my private life was analogous to being “in the closet.” In that moment, as Jake allowed me access to his own coming out narrative, I was able to identify a useful metaphoric and theoretical position from which to approach my own story. My work was being arrested; not by motherhood, but rather by the larger cultural dialogue around professional positionality that made it difficult for me to name, claim, and work within my challenges without flagging them as a handicap. It was the historical (though often invisible) stereotypes visited upon women in the workplace—combined with the even more deeply embedded stereotypes of single motherhood—that shaped the gaze of my professional trajectory. There was, I discovered, a difference between keeping one's life private and keeping one's life secret. Perhaps a bit satirically, this piece is named for Erasmus's Praise of Folly written in honor of his friend Sir Thomas More. Erasmus's elegy begins as a characterization of the work's antagonist, “Folly,” and ends with a critique of the church—a critique that serves as a catalyst in the Protestant Reformation. It has always been one of my favorite works, and my essay, from a technical standpoint, intends to pay homage to the transformation from frivolity to jaded divinity, as I experience it during twelve hours of motherhood. There are two things that I want to draw particular attention to in this piece: First, I was interested in the use of numbers to chronicle the feeling that everything is delineated, “timed,” in motherhood. Expiration comes quickly. Its like watching milk spoil in fast motion. Second, and not separate from the first, many intersections informed the frenzied pace of this essay: like gender (isn't this, after all, a woman's problem?) then race (aren't I always defying the myth of racial mediocrity?) then motherhood, then religiosity (because, as the end of this essay suggests, everything roots back to the presence of the divine). This essay begins my process of coming out. I regret, only, that I did not do it sooner. Perhaps I could have saved some milk from spoiling. ‘Praise of Folly’ by Audrey Elisa Kerr We have been up since 5 am, and I am warming milk in a cheap metal pot that burns and sets off the fire alarm every single morning. With the whistle of the one train, I drop an egg. I wipe it up with our one dish cloth and...