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.
A Quick Writing Course from John McPhee
I used to teach a class in creative nonfiction (a descendent of the “New Journalism” of the 1960s-1970s). If there is an American master of creative nonfiction, it would be John McPhee.
I could have just taken this long interview with McPhee from The Paris Review, chopped it into bits, and had most of a semester’s worth of lecture notes. It’s that good.
A few excerpts—here is McPhee on choosing what or whom to write about:
I certainly don’t go around looking for loners, but I guess I am interested in people who are expert at something, because they’re going to lead me into some field, teach it to me, and then in turn I’m going to tell others about it. The ideal situation is to be watching somebody do their thing, and they don’t give a damn about you because they’re so absorbed. They’re confident about what they’re doing, and they’re not at all consumed with self-consciousness.
I used to tell all my students, particularly those just starting out, to read their stuff aloud. (It’s amazing how many students cannot read aloud comfortably.) McPhee does it:
Certainly the aural part of writing is a big, big thing to me. I can’t stand a sentence until it sounds right, and I’ll go over it again and again. Once the sentence rolls along in a certain way, that’s sentence A. Sentence B may work out well, but then its effect on sentence A may spoil the rhythm of the two together. One of the long-term things about knitting a piece of writing together is making all this stuff fit.
I always read the second draft aloud, as a way of moving forward. I read primarily to my wife, Yolanda, and I also have a friend whom I read to. I read aloud so I can hear if it’s fitting together or not. It’s just as much a part of the composition as going out and buying a ream of paper.
And here is an excerpt from a section of the interview where he talks about how creative nonfiction pieces develop their own structure—and how that structure can be manipulated.
But what if you started telling the piece of writing further down the river, I wondered. That way, when you get to the end of the trip, you’re really only halfway through the story. What you do then is switch to the past tense, creating a flashback, and you back up and start your trip over again. By the time you get to that bear, that bear is at the perfect place for a climax. That’s what’s exciting about nonfiction writing. In this case it’s a simple flashback, but it also echoes all these cycles of the present and the past.
Memory is a Tricky Thing
I recently emailed my cousin when I ran across a Web page mentioning the man whom I thought was our grandfather’s business partner in a Tulsa, Oklahoma, menswear store.
No, she said, our grandfather had been the manager but never a partner.
Once again, if I were trying to write a memoir based on my own memories, I would get another detail wrong.
And that is the problem: Our memories are rigged.
We don’t remember what happens, but we let other, archetypal stories shape our memories.
And, as this brief NPR piece also points out, we see patterns where there are none.
I did learn that much as a young guy when I got a job servicing slot machines in a variety of logger bars and VFW halls in western Oregon.
People always thought they saw patterns: “That machine is ready to pay out.”
Nope, every spin is a fresh universe, so to speak.
But if people really understood probabilities, state lotteries would go bust.
Green Egg Sponsors a Podcast
Oberon Zell, co-founder of the long-lived Pagan zine/magazine/ezine Green Egg, and Ariel Monserrat, its current editor, have started podcasting.
On “Over to Oberon & Ariel” this Wed. June 1, our special guest will be Sylveey Selu, founder of the Pentacle Project. Learn what the Pentacle Project is and how you can help. The Pentacle Project was formed to help Pagans become aware of the attacks on Pagans in the Bible Belt by extreme-right Dominionist Christians. Learn about the rising wave of militant, uber-fundamentalist Christians, what they think and why they are a threat to the rest of America, not just Pagans.
Ariel and I are planning many exciting shows to come, with compelling topics and fascinating guests. Through more than 40 years of publishing Green Egg, both in print and now online, Ariel and I have come to know the most interesting, knowledgeable, and erudite personalities on the leading edge of Gaea’s evolving consciousness. Join us on “Over to Oberon & Ariel!”
You can hear or download their first attempt here, via Witch School’s Blog Talk Radio channel, “Pagans Tonight.” Oberon and Ariel do not come on until an hour into the podcast—before that is an hour of Witch School founder Ed Hubbard maundering about tornadoes and what not.
I wish them well, but my considered opinion is that verbal podcasting is harder that it seems. (Musical podcasting seems to work better.)
You have the format of two people, usually not in the same room, making forced small talk—or even a bunch of people, not in the same room, kicking topics around and making in-jokes with each other. (Example, NSFW.)
Howard Stern does it better—and I don’t listen to him either much.
Maybe I’m just grumpy because I see no time in my day for listening to an hour or two of chat. My 80 minutes of car commuting used to provide lots of listening time, but you won’t hear me saying that I want to go back to that!