Christians in Albemarle County, Va., get permission to put church announcements in school kids’ “backpack mail.”

Then a Pagan group follows the same, now permitted, procedure.

Alarm ensues.

• Sgt. Patrick Stewart’s memorial pentacle makes the Associated Press newsfeed. That lawsuit against the VA is getting national media attention.
• Two more sites aggregating Pagan-related news items: Green Viking News and The Pagan Activist.
• Find the god you need at God Checker.

I saw an ad in The New Yorker for someone who will help your high-school student to write that dreaded college admissions essay

With that in mind, here from my own school’s alumni magazine is an Admissions Department insider’s view of that genre.

I wonder why they admitted me, though. As I recall, I wrote part of an essay, became frustrated, cut it off abruptly, and made up the balance by including some of my “brilliant” high-school poetry. Maybe they had a “rebellious poet” slot open.

Jason Pitzl-Waters links to a survey showing “nature religion” to be the fastest-growing religious category in Australia.

Jim Lewis, a long-time scholar of new religious movements, presented a similar roundup last week at AAR-SBL. Interestingly, he found the number of Pagans in English-speaking countries to come in consistently at about 0.1 percent. (That’s one-tenth of one percent.)

I think that should Pagans reach about the 2-percent mark, it would be a sort of tipping point. What that Paganism would look like, I have no idea.

“Growth” is a debatable term, of course. The steering committees for each AAR program unit are supposed to track how many people come to each session for institutional-research purposes. At one of the new religious movements sessions, an attendee cracked, “Let’s just be like the Scientologists and count everyone who comes through the door [as a member].”

Yeah. Whose numbers do you trust?

• Abstracts of articles published in The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies are now available online and searchable.
• Advanced Book Exchange is my normal starting place for used or out-of-print books, but it is getting some competition from ChooseBooks.com, which claims to be more selective or something. Naturally I went to their site and searched on my own stuff, and what a surprise to see my junior-year literary magazine from Reed College listed for $49.99. That was not because I had some poems in it; rather, the contributors included Lee Blessing, who became a Pulitzer-winning playwright, and his friend the screenwriter Eric Overmeyer.
• Coming home from AAR-SBL, M. & I had a layover in Chicago, so after coffee at her favorite hangout, Intelligentsia on Jackson Street, we walked down to the Art Institute. (I have a standing date with John Singer Sargent there; he painted like I want to write.)
• My mind still at AAR, I became way too amused at an exhibit titled “Art of the Islamic World: Unity and Diversity.” That could be the perfect all-purpose after-the-colon academic title. “Chicago: Unity and Diversity.” “America in the Jacksonian Era: Unity and Diversity.” “The Corvidae: Unity and Diversity.” “Contemporary Paganism: Unity and Diversity.” Or, as M. suggests, “unity in diversity,” for even more ambiguity. Either one would do. I would tell my freshmen students to try it, except that I don’t think they would understand that I was speaking ironically. I would immediately receive six or eight papers with “Unity and Diversity” in the title!

The Capitol as it looked on my last morning’s walk to the AAR-SBL meeting.

Coming home from the American Academy of Religion-Society for Biblical Literature meeting means an enormous amount of “paper management.” Books, catalogs, receipts, business cards, mysterious scribbled notes, sample copies of journals, maps, newspaper clippings–all are dumped on my desk and need to be sorted out.

Somewhere in the pile is my notebook with about seven pages of “to do” items.

One thing I did hear was an insider’s perspective on the lawsuit against the Veterans Administration over the pentacle on Sgt. Patrick Stewart’s memorial. Thanks to the state of Nevada, he did get his pentacle.

Suffice it to say that the lawsuit may force the VA to reveal that a double standard was employed. There is an old saying: A fish rots from the head.

As I work through that to-do list, I’ll have more to say about our sessions. Meanwhile, here is one bookseller’s take on the last day of the book show..

For reading on last week’s train trip to Washington, D.C., I brought Steve Stirling’s The Protector’s War; it is the second of a post-apocalyptic trilogy, following Dies the Fire.

In the first book, set in the 1990s, some mysterious Change occurs and suddenly electricity does not flow, internal combustion engines do not combust, gunpowder will not explode, and even steam engines do not function well enough to be useful. One of the characters tries to explain it as a change in the laws governing the behavior of gases. That last is a bit of a stretch, since other sorts of machines, including pumps, do work, and wood-fueled fires do burn. But Stirling clearly wanted to write a Neo-Medieval tale, and so he bypasses any revival of the Age of Steam.

Within months of the Change, the end of civilization as we know it, the survivors have reverted to idealistic feudalism (the good guys) or despotic feudalism (the bad guys) or outright banditry (the enemies of both). Having a background in special operations (Green Berets, SAS) or the Society for Creative Anachronism seems to be helpful for survival as either good guy or bad guy, since large amounts of the books involved small-group tactics, covert operations, and combat with edged weapons. Having read all of Tolkien’s work twenty times can be a plus too. (The SCA must luv this series.)

Probably the main reason that review copies of parts two and three arrived in my mailbox is Sterling’s pride in creating the character of Juniper MacKenzie, folksinger and Wiccan high priestess, whose coven becomes the nucleus of “Clan Mackenzie,” a burgeoning tribe of small farmers and craftspeople who take their archery practice very seriously. The clan makes the “Old Religion” the dominate faith tradition of Oregon’s middle Willamette Valley—except for the monks at Mount Angel and a few other hold-outs.

Having Wiccan characters in a novel of alternative history is not exactly mainstreaming them—-and I could just as easily see a charismatic Protestant pastor organizing the Lord’s Army of kick-ass archers and pikemen—-but it does allow the books’ characters to bring a Pagan sensibility to this tale of war and survival.

In this second book of the series, which takes place nine after the Change, the older characters are looking at the older teens, who were little kids when civilization died, and then wondering about the next generation, who will never have known anything else, and how their worldview will be significantly different from that of the people who were adults during the Change.

I wonder if Stirling would have related that to one of the live issues within Pagan studies—-and the movement in general—-about how the religion(s) will change as more and more cradle Pagans and then their children come into them.

This story is funnier to me because I am blogging two blocks from the White House.

Could Aleister Crowley be George W. Bush’s grandfather?

More later: I am too busy at the American Academy of Religion meeting. My trip here was 48 hours of chaos, but it is all truly worth it to be with the Pagan Studies crowd.

UPDATE: I do not necessarily buy the Bush-Crowley connection, but as Eric Riley points out, it does put a different spin on creating your own reality.

Once again, the Japanese turn Western religious categories on their heads.

Omi Junko was surprised to find out that some of the Western priests were not genuine.

“If people are crying by the end of the wedding, I think I have done a good job.”

This won’t last, but CNN is polling viewers on whether the Veterans Administration should do the right thing and create a Wiccan grave/memorial marker.

So far the Yes votes are far ahead. I suspect that that is because Americans mostly think that (a) religion is a personal matter and (b) anyone who served in the military ought to get the religious marker of their choice.

Some background here and more current news here.

UPDATE: At GetReligion, they are wondering if the pentacle might be offensive to families of nearby-buried vets. I suppose the star of David and that atheistic atomic symbol are offensive too.