Three issues of the journal Paranthropology: Journal of Anthropological Approaches to the Paranormal are available online as PDF files.
I had been meaning to download these for a while—finally did it, and I look forward to reading them.
CFP: Canadian Pagan Conference
Gaia Gathering: Canadian National Pagan Conference
Theme: Language to Liturgy
Gaia Gathering was founded in 2004 and had its first conference in 2005. Each year the conference is hosted over the Victoria Day long weekend in a different Canadian city through a bidding process similar to the Olympics. Past host cities include Edmonton, Halifax, Winnipeg, Ottawa and Vancouver.
Legally, we are incorporated federally as a non-profit organization and operate with a national Board of Directors as well as a local host committee.
The conference is organized collaboratively by Canadian Pagans and includes three days of discussion and workshops about Canadian Paganisms. After six years of traveling across the country, the conference is finally coming to Montreal’s Concordia University! The proposed theme for 2011 will be “Language to Liturgy,” which reflects the cultural diversity of Montreal and how language itself can affect our practices and beliefs.
Our keynote speakers are Lucie Dufresne, Professor at the University of Ottawa, speaking on Language, and Arin Murphy-Hiscock, published author and priestess, speaking on Liturgy. We are also planning an opening multifaith panel on the Friday night and live entertainment on Saturday and Sunday evenings.
Conference will be held Spring 2011 (May 20-23)
SUBMISSION CRITERIA
We invite papers and proposals from all faculties within the humanities who touch into the realm of alternate spirituality, Paganism, New Religious Movements and related subjects. We hope to see students rise to the challenge and welcome them to this opportunity to present here in Montreal with like-minded individuals.
Submissions may be sent via mail or e-mail and are to be no more than one page. They must include a publication-ready, titled abstract of 150-200 words. The name, address, telephone numbers, e-mail address, college or university affiliation and level of study of the presenter(s) must also be included. Any special requests or needs for audio-visual equipment must also be indicated. We will be accepting submissions for peer and academic reviewbetween December 21st (Yule 2010) and March 20th (Ostara 2011).
Abstracts and proposals (and thus presentations) may be in English or in French. All received submissions will be acknowledged, with notification of acceptance, by mid-April 2011.
Email to: scarletcougar@gmail.com
Postal mail to: ATTN Scarlet (Gaia Gathering)
Department of Religion, Concordia University
1455 de Maisonneuve Blvd. West
Montréal (Québec)
H3G 1M8
Magical Religion is Always Falling Apart
A recent post at Patheos by Thorn Coyle, “The Sundering of Feri,” has been getting some attention, at The Wild Hunt, for instance.
She begins,
It is said of late that the Feri Tradition has been broken in two, being named by folks on one side of the divide as a split between the “Mystery tradition” (taking on the old spelling of Faery) and “public religion” (Feri). While there have been splits and factions for almost as long as the tradition has been active, while the spelling of the name changed over time, and scapegoating, shouting, and long silences have abounded, I never before felt such an energetic sundering. As I write this, I can feel the mighty gates closing on what was. What will emerge, I do not know. Perhaps nothing will change, and perhaps everything will. Such are the times we live in, and various are the pronouncements of our egos trying to figure things out.
As far as “the times we live in,” I have been hearing reports of how Faerie/Faery/Feri ain’t what it used to be ever since the 1980s.
It’s the nature of magical religion to be always splitting and changing. The only equivalent group dynamics and politics that I have seen to match it occur in martial arts schools—something else that Thorn knows a little bit about.
She wonders,
At what point in an ecstatic, syncretic, Bardic tradition, does one’s own work cease to be of that tradition?
Given that Feri has been syncretic since whenever Victor Anderson first read the works of Max Freedom Long, themselves dating from the 1930s-1940s, I really don’t think that she has a problem, conceptually speaking. So why not add Gurdjieff (shudder) and call it Feri. But she decides that she must call herself something else.
In one way, her essay points to an ongoing problem in contemporary Paganism: It’s hard to make a mass movement out of small-group mystery traditions.
Yes, we need more public events: festivals, processions, theatrical events. The ancestors also went in for sacrifice-feasting events, but the theology of publicly offering life to the gods is still too scary for most Pagans. (There are exceptions.)
The trouble is, the model of “religion” available from the monotheists is just wrong. Every seven days, everyone lines up and listens to holy books or to a long sermon or bangs their heads on the floor. That just is not us. We are supposed to be about embodiment, ecstasy, performance, and ritual. So much is “enough” and how often do we do it?
UPDATE: Welcome, visitors from The Wild Hunt. Check out the rest of the blog.
Famous Archaeologists Who Fail
They are all fictional, of course.
Actually, in my experience, archaeologists are indeed a vicious bunch, but they usually eschew large-caliber revolvers and bullwhips.
(Tip of the stained fedora to Caroline of Necropolis Now.)
‘Academically Adrift’
It is probably no surprise to a lot of us in higher education that “45 percent of students show no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years.”
(Lest I be accused of America-bashing, in talking with international students, I got an even worse impression of universities in some other countries, e.g. Italy and France.)
Not much is asked of students, either. Half did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester, and one-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading per week.
An awful lot of students in university classrooms simply should not be there. They are not prepared—academically, psychologically, or both.
(“Psychologically unprepared” would have applied to me as a freshman too. I struggled along and “woke up” midway through my second year.)
These students are there because they are told to “get a college degree,” whereupon they will be magic somehow.
Now we hear more and more about a higher education bubble on the point of bursting, just like the real estate market.
Get a degree, have thousands of dollars in student-loan debt, and work at Starbucks. It’s not a viable model of higher education if the cost keeps rising but the benefits of paying them do not seem to be there.
If this realization reaches a tipping point, it won’t be good for academic employment for us professors.
The fiscal conservative in me says, “Go ahead, shut down a few state schools. All but about three states are running budget deficits and need to save money.”
And then I wonder if any of my academic friends would lose jobs or be unable to find jobs if that happened. But it might happen anyway.
Erin O’Connor comments too and has a more clever headline.
And Vanity Fair delivers the snark.
Why I Love Typographers
Because they have standards, damn it, and they don’t get all PC about them.
“Forget about tolerating differences of opinion: typographically speaking, typing two spaces before the start of a new sentence is absolutely, unequivocally wrong,” Ilene Strizver, who runs a typographic consulting firm The Type Studio, once wrote. “When I see two spaces I shake my head and I go, Aye yay yay,” she told me. “I talk about ‘type crimes’ often, and in terms of what you can do wrong, this one deserves life imprisonment. It’s a pure sign of amateur typography.”
What prompted this tirade was an observation that people who learned typing on computers do it. Putting in two spaces after a period (full stop) is the correct thing to do on a typewriter.
When I edit a piece of text, the first thing that I do is run a search-and-replace for two spaces. I know that I still sometimes put two spaces between words, but that is more of a nervous stutter-while-typing.
Via Ann Althouse.
Around the Pagan Blogosphere
• Ways of leaving offerings for land wights, at Golden Trail.
• Hermes versus the Internal Revenue Service (and a great poem) at The Alchemist’s Garden.
• “Animist Human Diplomats” at Adventures in Animism. Are you asking more than you are giving?
• Still on the theme of place: Dealing with a psychically hostile place of the dead, from Three Shouts on a Hilltop.
This is not Good Academic Writing
Contrary to what some people think, this is not good academic writing:
The theory of [redacted] that have [sic] been presented in this paper [not that she actually, like, presented it ] could considered as plausible theoretical guesswork that could illuminate that presumed cognitive imaginative devices that led to the conceptualization of the initiatory experiences and their incorporation in the wider narrative life-story …. [it goes on].
That sentence fails the “Who did what?” test. It could be revised as “Blank’s theory does XXX because YYY.”
But I think it deserves as Author’s Query to that effect, because I really cannot tell what the writer wishes to communicate here.
There is a verb, however. Several, in fact. We have something to work with. But what should be the main verb?
Glass of red wine time.
Pagan Perspectives on Marriage
Charlton Hall, a licensed marriage and family therapist and an American Druid, is conducting research on Pagan attitudes towards marriage.
You may take a short survey and register your opinion here. The link is in the box on the upper left.
Feel free to pass on this link to other blogs, forums, etc.
The ‘Sickness’ of Monotheism
Prompted to write on “Muslim-Christian relations” for the Washington Post’s “On Faith” section, Jason Pitzl-Waters changed the terms of the usual interfaith conversation and “spoke truth to power,” thus:
These events are the sad fruits of mixing raw social and political power with religions that operate on a exclusionary, one-true-path, basis. What you see in Iraq or Egypt is just the extreme and violent form of a sickness that has haunted history since the now-dominant monotheisms rose to prominence and power [emphasis added].
He then linked to his piece on Facebook and at his Wild Hunt blog.
Right away some concern troll pops up asking, “Of course, you don’t address why a fair number of Pagans, who belong to a supposedly tolerant and diverse community of non-monotheists, are also in the anti-Muslim camp.”
It’s all about [nasty Western] imperialism, you see.
Sure. Take Persia (Iran) for example, the center of a major empire for centuries. Then conquered by the Muslim Arabs in the eighth century, who killed off most of the native Zoroastrian priests and imposed Islam at the point of the sword. Reconquered by the Muslim Tamerlane, who piled up thousands of skulls whenever someone “questioned his authoritah.”
Seriously, I think we are in the “anti-Muslim camp” because we know well that thousands of Muslims want us either (a) converted to their One True Way or (b) dead. Those are your choices.
Look what happens when a “moderate” politician in Pakistan questions that country’s draconian anti-blasphemy laws, which make it criminal to say anything remotely bad about Islam—although you can insult Hindus, Christians, and, I suppose, even Wiccans to your heart’s content.
When he is murdered, his killer is a hero to lawyers (!) and to religious leaders. (Read the dead governor’s last Twitter here.)
I have to wonder, when you drive through Islamabad or Lahore, are there billboards?
Know a Blasphemer?
Call our confidential tip line: 1-8oo-OFF-HEAD
Allah will reward you (and so will the government)!
Is a thorough knowledge of blasphemy law a way to riches in the Pakistani legal profession, like being an expert in water law is here in Colorado?
• • •
One of my favorite scholars of new religious movements, Bob Ellwood, wrote a book late in his career called Cycles of Faith: The Development of the World’s Religions.
He set forth a sort of “lifespan development” theory of religion, in which all the biggies go through the same stages, even as humans go through infancy, childhood, adolescence, etc.
It seems too pat, but it’s appealing, at least when looking at Christianity and Islam.
Ellwood argues that Islam now is where Christianity stood in the 16th century, in the “reformation” stage. And that was the era of the witch trials and of religious wars up and down Europe with aftershocks that carried into the Americas and even followed European explorers and settlers into Africa and South Asia.
Islam, he argues “is in fact displaying many of the initial characteristics of the Reformation period in the history of a world religion. There is a response to secularizing trends, an inward fervor, the early desire to create an ideal society, the emergence of a new kind of elite.” In this case, Islamic thinkers see decay in the Muslim world and blame it all on “the West” (and on the Jews, naturally).
So the concern troll above is just parroting that line: everything the matter in the Islamic world is the fault of “the West.”
Ultimately, Ellwood suggests, the blood-letting recedes, and we move into the era of Folk Religion, when a dominant religion becomes disconnected from the concerns of the political elites—except when convenient. That is where he places Western Christianity now.
I find the book interesting although I distrust Grand Intellectual Schemes. And I doubt that I will live long enough to see the end of the bloody Islamic “reformation,” which because I am a Western Pagan, represents a very real threat to my health and well-being if it comes too close.
Lucky for Jason Pitzl-Waters, there are no blasphemy laws in America, and the very fact that the Washington Post solicits his views shows that religion is not something we kill people over in America, usually.