It must be a slow news day, because the Denver Post’s daily news poll is about God . . . or Goddess . . . or the Gods.
“Hard” polytheism is running at less than 2 percent, so if you can’t vote early, vote often.
I doubt than anyone is going to do anything useful with the data anyway.
Likewise, the difference between “Let’s eat Jennifer” and “Let’s eat, Jennifer” is whether Jennifer will be in a stew pot or a dining chair. You saw the comma there, right?
Announcement of a new conference:
Pagans in Dialogue with the Wider World: A Pagan Studies Symposium
Friday, February 15, 2013 at San José State University (semi-concurrent with PantheaCon, February 15-18, 2013, DoubleTree Hotel, San Jose, California)
Sponsored by San José State University, Humanities Dept., Comparative Religious Studies Program. Organizers: Lee Gilmore (SJSU) & Amy Hale (St. Petersburg College)
Contemporary Paganism, in all its varieties, stands at a unique cultural and religious intersection that can provide insights for a wide range of global, social, and political subjects, beyond its own inward facing concerns. For this symposium, we are calling for scholarly submissions that focus on Paganism’s contributions to and engagements with broader cultural and religious dialogues in an increasingly pluralist world. These could include, but are not limited to, explorations of Paganisms’ endeavors in community, economic, media, health, legal, social justice, and institutional development work, as well as activist, applied, interdisciplinary, and interfaith work.
More generally, all submissions that critically examine Paganism(s) in relationship to categories such as religion, culture, gender, identity, authenticity, power, and ritual — among other possible frameworks — are welcome. In addition, all papers presented at the symposium will be considered for publication in a special issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies.
All proposals & queries should be sent to pagansymposium@gmail.com
Deadline: September 15, 2012
More info, including submission requirements & a pdf of this call, may be found at the site.
Conference on Current Pagan Studies: Pagan Sensibilities in Action
January 26 & 27, 2013, Claremont, California
Call for Papers
This year we will focus on Pagan Sensibilities in Action. We welcome papers that discuss how our pagan perspectives manifest as our lived experiences in artistic expression, personal and collective practice, the manner in which we hold power, and other engagements, including involvement in politics, social justice, ecological concerns and economics. How do Pagan theo(a)logies inform our being in the world?
This year we are encouraging proposals for academic panels. Please contact us early if you would like to organize a panel.
We are looking for papers from all disciplines. A community needs artists, teachers, scientists, healers, historians, philosophers, educators, thinkers, activists, etc.
As usual, we are using Pagan in its most inclusive form, covering pagans, wiccans, witches and the numerous hybrids that have sprung up as well as any indigenous groups that feel akin to or want to be in conversation with Pagans.
Abstracts should be no longer than 350 words and are due by September 30, 2012. Go to our website for advice on presenting papers. Please email abstracts to pagan_conference@yahoo.com
People keep attempting to tease out the secret of Stonehenge. The astronomical-calculator explanation bulked large at one time and remains in popular consciousness, but do you really need to haul large stones for many miles in order to predict the solstice?
If any thing, I suspect that it was more a question of using the solstices, etc., as demonstrations of how the “power of Heaven” reinforced the rule on earth of King Somebody and his descendents, the one who ordered the building of the monument. (Given its age and the stages of construction, there were no doubt multiple King Somebodies.)
But the search goes on. Here is research on the monument’s acoustic properties, using the replica Stonehenge in Washington state, which has all its pieces and is the same size as the original. Video and more links about studying sound in archaeological sites at the link.
(Via The Daily Grail)
This may be the worst sort of environmental determinism, but what is it with Egypt? Is there something in the Nile water?
For centuries Egyptian Paganism seemed to function—on one level—as as sort of post office of the dead. All those mummified cats, ibises, crocodiles, etc. neatly stacked in little p.o. boxes. What’s with that?
And of course there was the elaborate bureaucratic ritual that accompanied the mummification. The Greek historian Herodotus (a bit of a gossip) commented,
The wives of men of rank are not give to be embalmed immediately after death, nor indeed are any of the more beautiful and valued women. It is not until they have been dead three or four days that they are carried to the embalmers. This is done to prevent indignities from being offered them. (Link is to a different translation, but quite similar.)
Then, for several centuries, Egypt was mostly Christian. Christians liked to store the body parts of saints in their churches, which is why the Emperor Julian (PBUH) referred to them as “charnel houses.” What went on in the funeral business I do not know.
Today, in majority-Muslim Egypt, the Dubai-based Al-Arabiya television network reports that Egyptian women’s rights campaigners (there are some) are protesting two laws proposed in the “Islamist-dominated parliament”:
She was referring to two laws: one that would legalize the marriage of girls starting from the age of 14 and the other that permits a husband to have sex with his dead wife within the six hours following her death. . . . . Egyptian prominent journalist and TV anchor Jaber al-Qarmouty on Tuesday referred to [cleric] Abdul Samea’s article in his daily show on Egyptian ON TV and criticized the whole notion of “permitting a husband to have sex with his wife after her death under a so-called ‘Farewell Intercourse’ draft law.”
Because nothing expresses grief over losing one’s spouse quite like that.
UPDATE: Another source says that no such law was proposed. Was Al-Arabiya fooled?
The Common Errors in English Usage website clarifies a lot of things.
I still hesitate over “precede/proceed,” but the explanation for which to use when is easy to remember.
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.
Week-old pizza from the back of the refrigerator …
• Here’s an idea for a novel: “two down-on-their-luck entrepreneurs who stumble upon the idea of reviving for-profit idolatry. Selling statues of household gods to the masses, and building a neo-pagan religion around it.” Um, I think that people have been doing this for some time.
• Circus Breivik. Norwegian scholar of esotericism Egil Asprem analyzes the trial of Anders Behring Breivik. (He wrote about the shootings for the current Pomegranate.)
This trial will be about two things: psychiatry and ideology. Two drastically conflicting reports on Breivik’s mental health have already ensured this. Added to this, of course, is Breivik’s own clearly stated wish to be judged as sane, and have his actions confirmed as ideologically motivated.
• Teaching classical philosophy to Brazilian schoolchildren:
I assured the students that until the nineteenth century hardly any philosopher was an atheist. Plato’s Euthyphro—with its argument about the relationship between ethics and the will of the gods—gets us into a lively discussion.
* This is called “edgy, irreverent outreach” by some of today’s Christians Jesus Followers. I think the pastor needs to look up “pathos” in the rhetorical dictionary, because he is doing it wrong. But to be fair, some long-ago saints would have agreed with him.
• Alcohol “sharpens the mind.” But “beer goggles” are real too.
From Philip Jenkins’ Dream Catchers: How Mainstream America Discovered Native Spirituality, which I am reading as part of some research on changing attitudes towards shamanism:
In 1882 when a group of Zuñi emissaries visited Salem [Mass.] . . . they congratulated the citizens for their ancestors’ determined response to the witchcraft problem. Through the 1890s, U.S. authorities were struggling to suppress Zuñi persecution of witches in conflicts that nearly led to war. (31)
Which reminded me of one of my all-time favorite articles, Malcolm Brenner’s “A Witch among the Navajo,” or what happens when Pagan Witchcraft meets witch-as-translation-for-our-word-for-evil-magic-worker.
At the time of writing it, Malcolm was a newspaper reporter in Gallup, New Mexico, and the Zuñi tribal government was part of his beat. Previously he had lived on the Navajo reservation to the north, during which the events he described took place. His website.