Sounds like “news you can use from the 3rd century CE,” doesn’t it. Actually, it is today’s news.
“Higher Ed Bubble” Goes Mainstream
Another article on the “higher education bubble” (think housing bubble, but with college degrees) from that screaming right-wing rag The Christian Science Monitor. (That was meant as sarcasm.)
A college degree once looked to be the path to prosperity. In an article for TechCrunch, Sarah Lacy writes, “Like the housing bubble, the education bubble is about security and insurance against the future. Both whisper a seductive promise into the ears of worried Americans: Do this and you will be safe.”
“Administrative bloat” is real. At many big universities, the administrators now outnumber the teaching faculty.
At the other end of the spectrum, the small liberal-arts college that I attended has about the same number of students than it did a few years ago, but it now seems to require more deans and assistant deans to operate.
At least Reed College has not wasted money on big football stadiums full of empty seats like so many universities.
Universities keep raising tuition. Students get easy, taxpayer-guaranteed loans to pay that tuition, because a college degree is a Good Thing.
Can’t pay off the loan? Too bad. Not even personal bankruptcy will make it go away—the banks saw to it that the law was written that way. And no one can foreclose on your bachelor’s or master’s degree.
So what if people stop climbing on this particular merry-go-ground? What happens to all those assistant deans and the big, empty football stadium then? What happens to all my friends trying to get teaching jobs? What happens to me hoping that someone will adopt my book as a class text? What happens to my publisher?
The linked Tech Crunch article is even more hard-hitting.
Next thing, National Public Radio will discover this issue.
Making Retrograde Mercury Your Friend
I’ve been reading Diana Rajchel’s “Mercury Retrograde Boot Camp Series” (this is no. 9). Some good stuff there.
For this, the practical and metaphysical reason is the same:
You clear your path from things that were scattering your attention. Now, the things that need your attention get it faster. That’s immediately more time, attention and energy you can use for a) the people you want to give your attention to and b) for yourself.
I actually am usually productive during these periods. It is just that everyone else is so damn slow.
What Is It?
The brass rod with "horns"
Close up of the hand — or grip
Sometime in the late 1970s I read in a book by Doreen Valiente how she found discarded ritual artifacts in a Brighton antiques shop.
Unfortunately, I did not visit Brighton until shortly after her death, and while palling around with Evan John Jones, the only antiques shop I visited was one specializing in militaria, tucked away in The Lanes.
But back in the 1970s, still wet behind the ears, I edited a monthly magazine for antique collectors and made the round of many shops. I never found any obvious ritual artifacts—but there was this.
It looked magical—but what was it? I asked various senior Witches, particularly those born outside the United States, and got various answers, none of which was particularly satisfying.
Was it some kind of indicator of cuckoldry? A swizzle stick for a Really Serious cocktail? Or—and this one I could almost accept—part of an antique toasting fork, lacking the part with the tines? (Compare this brass toasting fork from the 1940s.)
Alas, it probably is not the artifact that will prove the existence of a pre-Gardnerian Pagan Witchcraft.
Christians’ Persecution Perplex
So there was some kind of big evangelical Xian pep rally in Houston, headlined by Gov., Perry of Texas, a possible presidential candidate, which is why that it is getting media attention.
Jason Pitzl-Waters watches it nervously from the minority-religious-rights perspective. Kallisti works it into a post on polytheism: “Powerful images and vengeful gods.”
The thundering irony is that the evangelicals see themselves as a persecuted minority in America, although they are willing to admit that Muslims are even more disliked.
The blogger linked, Bradley R.E. Wright, notes,
Similarly, somewhere along the line we evangelical Christians have gotten it into our heads that our neighbors, peers, and most Americans don’t like us, and that they like us less every year. I’ve heard this idea stated in sermons and everyday conversation; I’ve read it in books and articles.
There’s a problem, though. It doesn’t appear to be true. Social scientists have repeatedly surveyed views of various religions and movements, and Americans consistently hold evangelical Christians in reasonably high regard. Furthermore, social science research indicates that it’s almost certain that our erroneous belief that others dislike us is actually harming our faith. (emphasis added)
Why this need to feel like victims? Is it a hankering for the good old days of the 2nd century C.E. when they were persecuted (although not as much as they think)?
The Christians’ big mistake was when they stopped being at all “countercultural” and snuggled up to the emperor Constantine, who then used his power to intervene in their squabbles (see Council of Arles, Council of Nicaea.)
Jesus had little to do with kings, but things sure did change after that.
Soon there was no turning back. The Catholics adopted the imperial table of organization: Pope = emperor. College of Cardinals = Senate. Big church = city hall (basilica, lit. “royal tribunal chamber.”) In the Eastern Roman Empire, the Orthodox prelates generally were equally cozy with kings, right up through the end of Czarist Russia in 1917.
(Muslims, of course, did not even go through much of a countercultural period, since Mohammed led armies, negotiated treaties, etc. Yet they have a martyr complex too.)
On the principle that cornered animals are dangerous, this self-image of being a persecuted minority not only “harms their faith” but is indeed a potential seedbed of trouble for non-Christians.
A Bardic Duel in Parodies
The more I scrolled down through this post at Making Light, the more my jaw dropped—in a good way.
It is just stunning.
Familiarity with modernist poetry helps, not to mention Lewis Carroll and Scottish ballads.
But if you were one of the people who skipped literature classes because you thought that you would never use “that stuff” in later life, you won’t get it.
Sorry.
Beards and Religiosity
Religion journalist Mark Oppenheimer begins a New York Times article on the religious significance of beards this way:
Go ahead, picture a religious Jew.
Now picture a Muslim cleric.
Now an Amish farmer.
What do they have in common? Beards. And not neatly trimmed beards, but, in the popular stereotype, long, unruly beards, which connote piety, spiritual intensity and a life so hard at study that there is no time for a shave. The scholar, the mystic, the terrorist, the holy man — they all have beards.
Now who is missing from that list?
Of course, we would not want male Druids to be viewed as in an anecdote passed along by Adnan Zulfiqar, the Muslim spiritual adviser at the University of Pennsylvania:
“I recall one gentleman who came back from a trip to Pakistan and remarked to me, ‘I learned one thing: the longer the beard, the bigger the crook.’ His anticipation was people with big beards would be really honest, but he kept meeting people lying to him.”
On Not Crying for Borders Bookstores
From Rune Soup, a post to follow Jason Pitzl-Waters’ recent discussion of the Borders closing’s effect on Pagan publishers.
It is, as the man says, a “huge rant.”
Home Country: A Southern Colorado Catholic Splinter Group
I visited Florence, Colorado, yesterday and noticed that the congregation of St. Jude the Apostle of the Ecumenical Catholic Church of Christ (not to be confused with the Ecumenical Catholic Church) had apparently evaporated.
At least their sign was missing from the old brick church on Second Street by which I like to park on hot summer days because of the big trees there.
(Street shade is precious. Although Florence is not a Mormon settlement, it has little street-side irrigation channels like Weber City or Vernal, Utah, that seem to cool the air.)
The ECCC website is poorly designed and graphics-heavy, but if you scroll down you you can find the building and shots of the interior. At least one wedding was celebrated while the congregation occupied that space. Maybe it was like the last wedding at Hvalsey church in Greenland, in or about 1408
Like most Catholic splinter churches, the ECCC seems to have a high ratio of bishops and priests to parishioners.
It is one of the “independent Catholic churches,” shepherded or founded by “wandering bishops,” a term I first encountered when writing for Gnosis magazine back in the 1990s. “Congregations tend to be minuscule and sometimes even non-existent” (Wikipedia).
If you have read this far, you are probably wondering why you are reading about St. Jude’s the Ephemeral on a Pagan blog.
Reading about ambitious Pagan centers that are/are not foundering makes me think of the way in which little religious groups that are big on robes and ritual but short on cash sometimes over-extend themselves.
The Wanton Green—Both Book and Blog
Adrian Harris describes a new Pagans-and-place publishing project, The Wanton Green.
For many contemporary Pagans the relationship between bodymind and place is fundamental, but that relationship has rarely been explored in any depth. Paganism is often described as being polytheistic, animist or about ‘nature worship’, and while that’s all true in a vague and anodyne way, it’s of limited value.
Follow the link for more.