This is a multiple-choice test. A “gunsel” is
a. An attractive young woman
b. A novice criminal armed with a gun
c. A young homosexual man
d. An experienced Jewish hit man
Answer here. (Some mystery writers get this one wrong.)
Gallimaufry with Forbidden Phrases
• According to John Rentoul of the British newspaper The Independent, these phrases should be banned due to overuse. He tips his hat to George Orwell, all well and good, but someone in the comments notes that the Irish satirist Brian O’Nolan also eviscerated bureaucratese in his day, which was even earlier.
• Abraham Maslow’s “hierarchy of needs” is a staple of introductory psychology classes. But Gary Lachman (a/k/a Gary Valentine of Blondie, etc.) at The Daily Grail notes that it can take some odd twists in the world of the esoteric: “Maslow’s vision of a kind of Brahmin caste of ‘self-actualizers,’ uninterested in the kind of material gratification that most people desire, and oriented toward more ‘spiritual’ concerns, is a recurring fantasy in the world of occult politics.” Read the rest.
• If you have a book proposal in mind, does it include zombies? Get on the zombie bandwagon! Consider this one: “Christ, mythras [sic], and Osiris as zombie archetypes – a new spirituality for a new age…”
• Odd manners of dying in sixteenth-century England.
Why Secondhand Bookstores Are Addicting
Science can explain. It’s all chemicals!
Word Follies of 1913
They’ll be keeping their heads down when that Piney opens up with the Lewis gun. Then you shove the Bangalore torpedo under the barbed wire.
World War One had not started yet, but the technology and vocabulary were there.
Army Appoints Hindu Chaplain (Sort of)
There about 1,000 identified Hindus in the U.S. Army, and now they have a chaplain, Captain Pratima Dharm.
Yes, that is probably fewer than the followers of Pagan paths in uniform. The Buddhists have been recognized too, but a qualified Wiccan officer was rejected.
But there might be more to this story:
Dharm speaks easily of Christian teachings. A unique aspect of her story is that until this year, she wore the cross of a Christian chaplain on her battle fatigues. When she started on active duty in 2006, she was endorsed by the Pentecostal Church of God, based in Joplin, Mo.
But she’s now sponsored by Chinmaya Mission West, a Hindu religious organization that operates in the United States. A Washington, D.C.-area religious teacher who interviewed her for the organization before giving her an endorsement said her multifaith background is an advantage.
“She knows Christian theology, and she has a great grasp of Hindu theology,” said Kuntimaddi Sadananda of Chinmaya Mission’s Washington center. “This means she can help everyone.”
She didn’t convert from Christianity to Hinduism, she said.
“I am a Hindu,” she said. “It’s how I was raised and in my heart of hearts, that’s who I am.”
But — and perhaps it is hard for some Western Christians to understand — she hasn’t rejected Christianity either.
“In Hinduism, the boundaries are not that strict,” she said. “It is to base your life on the Vedantic traditions, and you can be a Christian and follow the Vedantic traditions.”
As I understand it, the Vedanta schools of Hinduism tend toward a sort of intellectual monotheism and reject all that colorful gods-and-goddesses stuff except when interpreted allegorically. So she has blended it with Christianity?
Chinmaya Mission West is an Advaita Vedenta organization.
Ronald Hutton Responds to His Critics
Even before his interview with Australian scholar/blogger Caroline Tully, Ronald Hutton had written a lengthy article for The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies titled “Writing the History of Witchcraft: A Personal View.”
It is now available as a free download from Equinox Publishing.
In it, Professor Hutton discusses the trajectory of his own work as well as responding to Ben Whitmore’s Trials of the Moon.
In the same issue, Peg Aloi reviews Trials of the Moon as well as Douglas Cowan’s Sacred Terror.
And I review yet another “grandmother story.”
The other articles in the latest issue (listed below) are behind a pay wall, although if you have access to a university library or to a good public library, they should be available through inter-library loan.
“The Idol and the Numinous: the Pagan Quest for the Holy”
Dominique Beth Wilson
“Shamanisms and the Authenticity of Religious Experience”
Susannah Crockford
“Negotiating Gender Essentialism in Contemporary Paganism”
Regina Smith Oboler
“The Meaning of ‘Wicca’: A Study in Etymology, History, and Pagan Politics”
Ethan Doyle White
“The Magical Cosmology of Rosaleen Norton”
Nevill Stuart Drury
Lawyers Comment on the Pagan Prison Chaplain Case
Of all the discussions of the prisoner “free exercise of religion” issue that produced a lawsuit brought by California volunteer Pagan prison chaplain Patrick McCollum, I recommend that you read Wiccan lawyer Hecate Demetersdatter’s explanation.
The appeals court has not decided on the rightness or wrongness of the basic question, but it has upheld the lower court’s ruling that McCollum does not have legal standing to bring the case, because he cannot show that he himself has been injured.
But here’s where, IMHO, Judge Schroeder sets out a clear path that shows how to build a successful case. Pagans need to request visits from Pagan chaplains (in hospital, when they are concerned about their family members, before appeals and other trials, etc.) and document that they get denied because their chaplains are not “regular paid chaplains.” They’ll probably also have to accept a visit from, say, a Catholic priest who counsels them about the evils of Witchcraft and then show why that didn’t work for them, because CDCR’s policy seems to envision paid chaplains ministering to prisoners outside their religions when necessary. And then, with the help of McCollum and those willing to raise funds and do magic, etc., they’ll have to pursue their claims in a timely manner.
More careful foundational work is going to be required, in other words. Someone—or better yet, several someones—is going to have to show “injury.”
Prisoner “free exercise” cases are not slam-dunks. Law blogger Howard Friedman lists a couple of recent instances that have not gone well for Pagan prisoners. (Watch his blog: these cases turn up frequently.)
Friedman’s summary of the McCollum decision:
The court concluded that many of the chaplain’s claims were derivative of inmate’s claims, and the inmate plaintiffs were dismissed because their claims were untimely or they had failed to exhaust administrative remedies. It rejected the chaplain’s claims that he had either third-party or taxpayer standing to assert the religious rights of Wiccan inmates.
Which again is about the issue of standing. I see no point in further appeals. It sounds as though a whole new case would be more successful, given time and willing plaintiffs.
You Can Tell if I’m Dressed like a Book Cover
At Academichic, grad students and others pick outfits based on book covers and/or dust jackets. You decide if the concept worked or was too … conceptual.
Word Follies of 1912
I’m singing the blues since I left my low-rent hometown, yet I find myself to be strangely ambivalent about jazz.
Do You Call Your Professor “Professor”?
How to address your professor, explained at Inside Higher Ed. (This is the American version.)
For those who prefer diagrams to prose, go here: “The Semiotics of Professor E-mail Signatures.”
It goes both ways. Advice to new doctorate-degree holders:
Once you have successfully defended your dissertation, after that initial round of congratulations and frequently bandied “Doctors” (which your close friends will likely succeed in articulating with exceeding sarcasm), and after you’ve managed to convince your nonacademic friends that you can’t write them Oxycontin prescriptions with a doctorate of philosophy, and when you show up for your first job, you’re going to need to decide how you prefer for your undergraduate and graduate students to address you. I say “undergraduate and graduate” because, if you teach both types of students, your preferences might be different in each case.
Just remember, you can move from formal to informal, but going the other direction is almost impossible to gracefully achieve.