Tag Archives: blogging

Gallimaufry: Tab Clearing

Having been knocked down by a head cold the past week, I am just cleaning out some old links.

• Should you use digital cameras for ghost-hunting?

I notice that a lot of the ghost-hunting articles in Fate magazine count “orbs” as evidence of spirits. But are they just artifacts of the digital photographic process?

• I think I want to read Breaking Open the Head.

In a similar vein, I recently bought Dale Pendell’s latest, Pharmako/Gnosis, and it is another stunning combination of entheogenic analysis, poetry, and pharmacology.

• You won’t find “Paganistan” here, but these religious-affiliation maps are interesting.

I note from the low affiliation counts in counties that match the Navajo and Hopi reservations in Arizona and much of the Lakota reservations in South Dakota that tribal religions were not censused either. This map’s concentration of Episcopalians in western South Dakota, however, is the result of that church’s presence on the various reservations.

• Bloggers like to note odd Google searches that brought readers to their blogs. Mine today is from Google Turkey: “sacrifice sheep watch woman video.” Does that seem a little creepy to you too?

Changing My Religion

No, you won’t see this blog recategorized or bounced from Blog Heaven (I hope). I mean my automotive religion.

After a process of conversion that began in 1997 but like all conversions had its precursors, M. and I have moved from the Volkswagenkirche to the Cult of Jeep.

It’s the woman’s fault, of course. I only bit the apple, uh, Wrangler, because she asked me to.

In 1977, before we were married, M.’s Dodge convertible was failing and, with my guidance and promise to do maintenance, she bought a used 1970 VW Bug. That car went through fire and flood, war and revolution, before we finally let it go about 1990.

It was followed by a 1969 pop-top camper bus (1982-94), a 1980 Rabbit pickup truck (1990-1997), and a 1984 pop-top Vanagon camper (1994-2005). The ’69 bus went to a woman who was born in 1969.

The Rabbit pickup was M.’s daily driver, but its low ground clearance and so-so snow performance were a hindrance after we moved into the mountains. One day she expressed a desire to have a TJ/Wrangler, and after some time had passed, lo, there was a Wrangler in the garage. And many a snowdrift it has blasted through (only occasionally having to be dug out).

Then I bought a neighbor’s ’73 CJ-5. And Granville King’s bible replaced the gospel according to John Muir on the automotive bookshelf.

It was only a matter of time. Parts for the Vanagon were becoming rarer, although we had a great European-car mechanic to keep it running. Its camping function was replaced by a pop-up trailer and a Jeep Liberty to pull the trailer with; and last Saturday I sold the Vanagon.

Now we are pure Jeep cultists and can do things like complain about anachronistic Jeeps in movies such as Patton.

Maybe Dad started it,bringing home National Guard Jeeps and giving us kids rides when we were little. And I liked his Forest Service Willys wagon, although he preferred pickups. (But he had two Wagoneers, so it’s famtrad.) And I still somewhere yearn for a yellow Commando like one of the cool girls in my high school drove. You know what they say: It’s like coming home.

The Revealer

When I left (I thought) journalism to go to graduate school in religious studies, I thought that one possible later career path would be to be journalist specializing in real religion reporting, as opposed to merely retyping churches’ news releases.

That path was not taken, but others have taken it, and a new way to follow religion-reporting is The Revealer, a blog based at New York University.

From a current entry:

“The religious language with which Disney sold its Celebration [planned community in Florida] and with which buyers bought it isn?t coincidental. The town was — is — the most stunning example of civic religion aestheticized, an extreme-case scenario of gated communities and ?new urbanism? throughout the country, the realization the impulse to create through quaint, storybook settings the community once provided by more stringent faiths.

“But all good things must come to an end, and so Disney embraces evolution rather than creationism by putting its Garden of Eden on the block and announcing plans to build elsewhere.”

I am flattered that Revealer’s “Links–Pagan” page includes this blog and also The Pomegranate, which is taking a lot of psychic energy now as I prepare the first issue with our new publisher.

Barbarians

This is the best New Yorker cartoon ever, as far as I’m concerned.

Wiccan Books Need ‘Earth Tones’?

A couple of months ago, Judy Harrow, author of several worthwhile books on Wicca, mentioned to me that publishers–or at least one of her publishers–have decided that such books’ covers require (1) a pre-Raphaelite female and (2) earth tones. Check out the cover of Devoted to You, an anthology on the Pagan deities that she recently edited for Kensington Books. See what I mean?

In my darker moments, I wonder if Wicca has gone from being a mystery religion to a fashion statement in fifty years. If you’re young, unconventional, angry at the world, you announce, “I’m Wiccan.” You don’t, however, want to say “I’m a witch,” because then people expect you to “do things.”

As for larger Paganism, check out this page of so-called Pagan blogs. Exactly what’s Pagan about it. (UPDATE: The link was dead, so I removed it.)

By the banks of Hardscrabble Creek

Since it has been several years since I have published any of the print versions of “Letter from Hardscrabble Creek,” I am creating this blog to talk about the process and progress of writing and also to comment on what I think are the best new books on contemporary Paganism and nature-based spirituality.

I will also be posting updates on my work in progress, a study of the Pagan revival in America, which has the working title of HER HIDDEN CHILDREN and which will be published by AltaMira Press.