Heresies
Yesterday by the photocopier, Colleague A (Political Science) cornered me. She and Colleague B (Psychology) had been at the local Barnes & Noble store and seen the B&N edition of The Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics, which I wrote in 1991 when a friend was acquisitions editor at ABC-Clio and invited me to do a book for them. “Is that our Chas?” wondered Colleague A. That’s what happens when you teach in one field and write in another!
Frankly, I was amazed a few years ago when B&N reprinted it. The check was a nice surprise too. Now it’s apparently out of print. I had been curious who bought the book, aside from the original intended market of librarians. This review from British e-zine editor Matthew Cheeseman gives one suggestion. (The lower trade-book price doesn’t hurt, either.)
A little Googling: here is an someone with an online Christian ministry building a virtual homily around my introduction. (Unlike Cheeseman, Timothy King evidently does not Google his sources.)
And speaking of a different sort of “heresy.” My humor column from the earlier, print version of “Letter from Hardscrabble Creek” on “Training Your Soul Retriever” pops up on an actual dog-training web site. (Scroll down). Or you can read it here. It was a gentle parody of retriever experts such as Eloise Heller Cherry and Richard Wolter. What would happen if Wolter collaborated with neoshaman Michael Harner?
Reincarnation
A study from Barna Research Group on beliefs about the afterlife shows 18 percent of Americans accepting the idea of reincarnation–even some evangelical Christians. Other contradictions abound as well. Thanks to Joe Perez for the original link.
The Roller Coaster
In a little bit of a haze from some hay-fever medication, I finished the first draft of Her Hidden Children, my book on the rise of contemporary Paganism (mainly Wicca) in America, over the weekend.
Now I have started the complete re-editing, and that means I am on the emotional roller-coaster. It’s pretty good. It’s pathetically sophomoric. I have some original insights. No, it’s just a miserable dribble from the cauldron of scholarship. It would have been better if I could have written it ten years ago; now it is dated, and who will care, anyway? No, I had some original insights.
And so on and on and on.
The only thing to do is to get it into the publisher’s hands (only a year and a half late) as soon as possible and move on to the next thing.
Meanwhile, I am awaiting my copies of The Paganism Reader
. Co-editor Graham Harvey says–and the illustration here, from Routledge’s web site, seems to confirm, that Routledge stayed with their utterly dreary cover design.
In the real world: I saw my first kestrel, flying low against a strong northwest wind, while driving to the university today. I left home wearing a leather jacket over a fleece vest, but at some point realized that I need not need the Jeep’s heater on (not that a 1973 CJ-5’s heater produces all that much warmth), and by the time I reached Pueblo, I was shedding layers. Spring comes on in a rush. When is the next blizzard due?