“Ask Academic Abby” is a service of the American Academy of Religion, so it is slanted towards graduate students in religious studies, but a lot of the advice is applicable to academic generally. But it appears only in the online Religious Studies News.
Tag Archives: academia
Pentagram Pizza for May 1
Four toppings this evening. . .
• Some occult-cult films from the past reviewed by Peg Aloi.
• Teaching a course in “world religions” is not as simple as it looks, once you start sorting out “religion,” “religious,” and questions of group identity.
• In the “Finding a God” chapter of Triumph of the Moon, Ronald Hutton describes the rise of Pan in Victorian literature. Sometimes he personified an idealized countryside while at others he was “a battering-ram against respectability.” He appears in America during that period too — this time as sculpture.
Returning the (Overdue) “Book of Power”
One of the jobs that usually falls on the writing program is teaching undergraduates not to be afraid of the university library. By contrast, in 2004, the University of Kansas, with gentle librarian humor, went the Lord of the Rings parody route, with this short video directed by then-film student Christopher D. Martin.
Choosing This Year’s AAR Pagan Studies Papers
Finally finished — I hope — with the process of selecting papers to be presented in the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group’s sessions and in our joint session with the Indigenous Religious Traditions Group at next November’s American Academy of Religion annual meeting.
Being co-chair is one of those secretarial-type gigs I get stuck with. It’s the penalty for being literate.
Thanks to all the steering committee members of both groups for their proposal evaluations, and thanks to the AAR staff for selecting a new software program that makes evaluation and session-creation easier. I still sweat bullets over the process, but it all seemed to work OK.
The less enjoyable part of the process is having to write to the people whose proposals were not scored highly enough. Here again the new software makes it easier to scoop up all the evaluation comments, paste them into a document, remove identifying names, etc., and pass them on. People need to know why their proposals were scored the way they were — were they just not suitable for the “call,” were they insufficiently analytical, or did they just promise too much? At least one proposal this year sounded more like a book outline than what could be covered in a 20-minute talk.
Some folks must just skip over this excellent advice on proposals.
Some sessions have respondents — scholars who summarize, evaluate, and critique all the papers after the presentations are over, serving as a sort of discussion leader during the Q&A. My next goal is to try to get the writers and the respondents communicating earlier in the writing process. I had a bad experience once of serving as a respondent and trying to write my critique only hours before the session — I felt as though all I produced was incoherent babble.
What will the papers’ topics be? I don’t want to jump the gun on the AAR’s process, but I will announce them in due course.
University Courses that I Wish I Could Have Taken
Anthropology 666, “The Anthropology of Shamanism and Occult Experience,” with Professor Neil Whitehead at Wisconsin.
I wonder what the exam questions were like and what sort of papers he assigned.
The ‘Fifth Branch’ of the Mabinogion & Some Plagiarizing Pagans
In 2008, an English academic who works with ancient and modern Celtic languages created “a piece of Iolosim,” in other words, a pseudo-ancient tale in the spirit of the Welsh literary forger and Druid revivalist Iolo Morganwg.
Written in Middle Welsh and “translated” into English, it purports to be a hitherto-unknown section of the Mabinogion, a famous collection of medieval Welsh tales with possibly older roots.
Imagine his surprise when he finds the whole thing—uncredited, of course—on a website devoted to “Keltic mysteries” and the revival of ancient Welsh Paganism, or some approximation thereof.
The ancient ‘Legend of Amaethon Uab Don’ quoted here as evidence for this mystic cosmological bollocks was penned over a month or so by yours truly, c. 2008, while glugging back the diet coke in Jesus College Oxford computer room. The website of this bunch of chumps not only has copied my entire text (in English and Middle Welsh), but also begins with a long and pompous screed about how wicked it is to steal other people’s material.
Anyone who read the “Fifth Branch’s” introduction carefully would have seen some signals that it was bogus—there is no “Judas College” at Oxford University, for one thing—but who reads carefully on the Internet when they are busy cutting and pasting?
When Is a Monk not a Monk?
When he or she is a student at the University of Pennsylvania.
Given that this is a religious-studies class (academic, not doctrinal) at a secular university, I thought that the professor had an interesting idea.
The … course on monastic life and asceticism gives students at the University of Pennsylvania a firsthand experience of what it’s like to be a monk.
At various periods during the semester, students must forego technology, coffee, physical human contact and certain foods. They’ll also have to wake up at 5 a.m. – without an alarm clock.
Rather than reading or watching videos, they would have an embodied experience.
Now obviously it is a doctrinal-content-free experience on one level: it is just “monasticism,” not Catholic or Buddhist or anything else in terms of content. We might call it “core monasticism,” on a parallel with Michael Harner’s “core shamanism.”
The “faith-free” aspect—and the reporter’s failure to ask the how’s and why’s—annoyed Terry Mattingly at Get Religion, the blog critiquing journalistic coverage of religion. (Believe me, there is plenty to critique.)
I assume that there would be other ways of stating that requirement that the students eliminate “physical human contact.” That might have something to do with chastity and celibacy. One wonders why the story didn’t simply state that clearly, right up front. Perhaps it’s more shocking these days to discuss students giving up coffee and cell telephones.
The key to reading this AP report, however, is to strive not to focus on the content of McDaniel’s class and to try to figure out the degree to which the reporter did or didn’t miss some basic subjects.
But first, what is the tradition that shapes this form of monasticism that is acceptable on an elite university campus?
In the comments, Prof. Anthea Butler, another member of Penn’s religious studies faculty, promises a response in her column at Religion Dispatches. It is not yet published, but I will link to to it when it is available.
Did the class have a “spiritual” component? Should it have? Or is asking college students to give up cell phones and coffee and to take notes with a pen equivalent to hair shirts, self-mortification, and ora et labora in itself??
Actually, my first thought was, “Where is the music?” The students should meet at 5 a.m. in a large room with a good echo for half an hour of Gregorian chant. But that would be “content.”
Thought Crime in the Writing Classroom
I taught writing for twenty years. I heard some shocking stuff—especially in the “Creative Nonfiction” class, which occasionally produced some, shall we say, highly confessional material.
And there was one outright psycho student who, lucky for me, fixated on a different professor as the cause of all her problems—not to mention accusing him in her writing (for me) of being a Satanic serial killer—and showed up at his house one night at 2 a.m. with a large knife.
I even had freewriting assignments that might have resembled “a place for a writer to try out ideas and record impressions and observations,” [containing] “freewriting/brainstorming” and “creative entries.”
But no one ever used his or her journal to discuss his or her sexual attraction for me (sigh).
If a student had done so, I would never have described the writing as “unlawful.” Immature or inappropriate maybe, but not something that would get a student kicked out of not just my class, but all his on-campus classes.
But Pamela Mitzelfeld, who teaches English 380, “Advanced Writing,” at a school in Michigan, felt she had to swing the big PC hammer on student Joseph Corlett.
Oakland University near Detroit has suspended a student for three semesters, barred him from campus, and demanded he undergo “sensitivity” counseling because he wrote in a class assignment that he found his instructors attractive. While the course specifically permitted students to write creatively about any topic, the university bizarrely chose to classify his writing as “unlawful individual activities.” Joseph Corlett came to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help.
To call the university’s decision to suspend Corlett for three semesters for his thought crime a “wild overreaction” is putting it mildly. I hope that FIRE roasts them.
The philosopher Hypatia faced a similar problem with unwanted sexual attraction, the story goes, and dealt with it much more directly.
Adjunct Teaching and the “Portfolio Life”
As part of a seasonal celebration of Imbolc — it’s about creativity, right? — I took a day and cleaned my big home office desk. Took everything off the top, stained the scratches with Old English Scratch Cover, and then polished the mahogany-veneer top with paste wax for protection against spilt coffee, tea, and whiskey. After sort and organizing all the papers, etc., I felt ready to begin a new season.
Part of that cleaning is cleaning out drafts of blog posts, such as this one:
At Academy Mercenary, Amy Hale holds up adjunct teaching against the concept of “the portfolio life” and thinks that they are compatible. (Plus more about the recent AAR annual meeting.)
In the past week or so I have been particularly inspired by the notion of the “portfolio life”, which is the idea that we start to see ourselves less as “having jobs” and more as possessing a variety of skills and interests that we can add to our portfolio. We can use our portfolio for marketing ourselves and also for making decisions on how we want to spend our time and resources. Portfolio lives also require knowing what resources you need, because the income streams are seen less as an identity anchor and more of a way to finance how you want to live. Although the portfolio life is frequently used to promote active retirement, I think there are plenty of ways for those of us not working 9 to 5 jobs to use this idea to use this concept to consider a more integrated life that is less defined by our jobs, and more defined by what we love. For people not engaged in standard employment, or do not have a single institution based position, this can be a very empowering life reframing exercise.
I graduated with what amounted to a BFA in Creative Writing, although Reed College called it a BA in English. I certainly knew that that degree offered no clear career path—having the concept of the “portfolio life” might have been helpful when I was in my twenties.
As it happened, I did pretty much what “the voices” told me to do, and it has worked out OK, so far.
Meanwhile, at Inside Higher Education, two essays imagine a new model, where both full-time professors and overworked adjunct professors leave the university to form guilds of academic ronin.
Ground Broken for Pagan Library
Ground was broken on the 17th for construction of the New Alexandrian Library in Georgetown, Delaware.
Its name references an ancient library in Alexandria, Egypt. It—or they, as there were several collections—was damaged in Roman wars, destroyed as part of a campaign against Pagan temples by a Christian bishop—and according to some accounts, also by Muslim conquerors of Egypt.
The history is hard to sort out, but there is a constant theme of repository of knowledge threatened or destroyed by war and religious bigotry, which is easy enough to understand.
To further complicate things, there is also a modern Bibliotheca Alexandria in Egypt, which claims to carry on the spirit of the original(s). One wonders what will happen to it if Egypt enters another period of bigotry and chaos. You might say that the book-burning has already begun.
Meanwhile, back in Delaware, if I understand correctly, Cherry Hill Seminary will treat the New Alexandrian Library as its physical library for further accreditation purposes.
Ivo Dominguez, one of the people involved in the project, noted
As much as I and many of you like the internet, or their Kindle or their iPad, there is no substitute for having rooted in the physical plane storage, special materials and more importantly, a catalyst for interaction. Where there have been great libraries, and libraries are as much the center for creation and presentation of culture, you have a crossroads where you have interaction between different people doing scholarly work. There is a place to point at and say, in this place we actually have the maturity and perseverance as a community to make something happen that stays.”
There is no Kindle, no electronic version that will ever be the same as actually being in the presence of a book that was owned by a particular author. Each of these books is like a Book of Shadows. Each is filled with the essence and the energy of the people who have worked with it. So there is something that can only be held in the physical realm.
They want to raise money to build a series of sturdy concrete-covered domes. It’s a noble project.