The Air Force Academy chapel will add a worship area for followers of Earth-centered religions during a dedication ceremony scheduled to be held at the circle March 10.
Gus diZerega notes it too.
Considering some of the previous church-and-state issues at the academy, this is major news.
Hmm. I might be able to work that into a talk that I might possibly be giving later that month in Colorado Springs.
“Cakes and wine” grounds you after ritual. Now some yoga classes are offering food (and sometimes wine) afterwards, and purists are in a knot.
• “Hard versus Soft Polytheism is a False Dichotomy.”
• A recently discovered statue described as the god Odin and welcomed by some reconstructionist Norse Pagans, is–by Viking Period artistic conventions–either a woman or the goddess Freya, says a Swedish archaeologist.
• The Necronomicon: “It’s like the Bible but different” (YouTube video). Via Plutonica.net.
• At The Soccer Moms’ Guide to Wicca: Unintentionally outed by the school district.
• Something that I wish more people would think about about: When is a wild animal an omen, and when is it just a wild animal?
News release:
The Canadian National Pagan Conference brings together Canadian activists, clergy and scholars interested in the neo-Pagan and revived pagan religions in Canada. These include, but are not lmited to Goddess spirituality, Wicca, Asatru and the Heathen paths, Romuva, Druidry and the Afro-diasporic religions.
A large part of the conference is peer-to-peer workshops on a number of issues important to the members of these religions: parenting, aging, family and sexuality, legal status and recognition, temple organization, and others.
However, integral to the conference from the beginning has been the academic stream of presentations of original research on Pagan paths in Canada (or elsewhere when presented by Canadian Pagan scholars). Research in the demographics of the neo-Pagans, the cultural and political influence of occultism, sexuality and Wicca, and other issues has been presented. The Conference presentations are peer-reviewed and cross-disciplinary (Religious Studies, Sociology and History have been well-represented).
Papers on any aspect of the history or current state of Paganism and neo-Paganism in Canada are welcome. Please send an abstract (250 words) and a brief CV of yourself to Sam Wagar, the academic co-ordinator. Both academics and non-academics are welcome to present research.
More information on the conference, which is happening at the University of Guelph over the Victoria Day long weekend, can be had from the website.
Earlier this month, I was reading the Cañon City Daily Record—a humdrum piece about a city council meeting in the nearby town of Florence—when this jumped out at me:
“We are welcoming to a great variety of spiritual seekers who would classify themselves in many ways, including alternative spirituality, metaphysical, holistic wellness, new age, neo-pagan Earth religion, ecospirituality, native American tradition, Buddhist, Sufi, meditation and yoga practitioners, tribal drumming musicians, feminist Goddesses spirituality, and Kabbalah mysticism.”
Whoa! I thought. Pagans in Florence? (Actually, there are a handful.)
It turned out that the Beltania festival, which had been in northern Colorado, is moving south. We are, after all, a less-fashionable and hence cheaper part of the state.
The Florence Mountain Park hosts a couple of mountain-man rendezvous each summer, and if the city is OK with those guys firing full-size blackpowder cannon, then they should be OK with all-night drumming too.
I mentioned last October how the closing of the private Wellington Lake campground southwest of Denver was forcing at least three Pagan events to seek new venues.
If this trend continues, M. and I won’t have to drive so far to attend some of them.
Someone once wrote that you should never become sexually involved with anyone crazier than you are.
You probably should not get involved with anyone deader than you are either.
But if you do, there is a website about it: “Sex with Ghosts.”
It is also in my current findings that woman are more apt to be involved in ghostly sexual encounters with men though I personally believe men or less likely to come forward fearing ridicule.
Yep, and those women buy all the Charlaine Harris novels too.
There is a long tradition in Western occultism about sucubbi (female) and incubi (male), and the general advice is, “don’t do it.”
A scholar co-edits a collection of essays on Buddhist warfare and “touches a nerve” to put it mildly.
Our intention is not to argue that Buddhists are angry, violent people—but rather that Buddhists are people, and thus share the same human spectrum of emotions, which includes the penchant for violence.
Setting immigrant Buddhism (Japanese, Vietnamese, etc.) aside, most Americans’ view of the Buddhism comes from intellectuals like D.T. Suzuki or various elite teachers, roshis, etc.
We Americans never saw Buddhism(s) in its original cultural contexts.
As I recall, some medieval Japanese monasteries used to send out armed monks to fight in various political struggles, just to name one instance.
During the 1980s, real people went to real prisons on the strength of children’s fantasies. Many of these were people who operated preschools and had devoted their lives to child care.
The 1987-90 McMartin Preschool trial, described as the most expensive criminal trial in American history, produced no convictions–but you can imagine the effect on the defendants’ lives.
The West Memphis Three were victims of the same prosecutorial hysteria over “satanism.”
The Amirault family trial in Massachusetts was another. To quote Dorothy Rabinowitz, author of No Crueler Tyrannies: Accusation, False Witness, and Other Terrors of Our Times
The accusations against the Amiraults might well rank as the most astounding ever to be credited in an American courtroom, but for the fact that roughly the same charges were brought by eager prosecutors chasing a similar headline—making cases all across the country in the 1980s.
Those which the Amiraults’ prosecutors brought had nevertheless, unforgettable features: so much testimony, so madly preposterous, and so solemnly put forth by the state. The testimony had been extracted from children, cajoled and led by tireless interrogators.
It’s like Salem 1692 again: letting kids fantasize and treating those fantasies as evidence in court. “Spectral evidence.”
On Tuesday, voters in Massachusetts will select a replacement for Senator Edward Kennedy.
The Democrats are running Martha Coakley, a former district attorney and state attorney general, who still thinks the Amiraults’ case was handled correctly and who has fought to keep Gerald Amirault in prison because she thinks he is some kind of satanic mastermind.
She is a Democrat, I’m a Democrat. But I don’t care if she likes kittens and puppies and takes good care of her aged parents.
For that reason alone–for being the spiritual descendant of the Salem witch-hunters–if I lived in Massachusetts, I would not vote for Martha Coakley.
UPDATE: Civil-liberties writer Randy Balko examines Coakley’s record. It sounds like she believes that the cops are always right and the courts never make a mistake.
I tend to get into some bad places psychologically when it’s the dark of the Moon and work is not going well. “No one respects me, no one pays any attention to what I say”—that sort of thing.
The best cure is to take a dog (who may or may not pay any attention but who can be bribed) and go for a hike, interrupted with geocaching, as described at the other blog.
Some writing is bland because it does not take chances. Other writing is bland because of poor technique.
William Zinsser deals with the second in this talk to international students in the Columbia University journalism school: “Writing English as a Second Language.”
Actually, writing—as opposed to speaking—is a “second language.” That is why it must be learned even by native speakers.
Here he is on bureaucratese—and translating bureaucratese into English is something every reporter must do.
First, a little history. The English language is derived from two main sources. One is Latin, the florid language of ancient Rome. The other is Anglo-Saxon, the plain languages of England and northern Europe. The words derived from Latin are the enemy—they will strangle and suffocate everything you write. The Anglo-Saxon words will set you free.
How do those Latin words do their strangling and suffocating? In general they are long, pompous nouns that end in –ion—like implementation and maximization and communication (five syllables long!)—or that end in –ent—like development and fulfillment. Those nouns express a vague concept or an abstract idea, not a specific action that we can picture—somebody doing something. Here’s a typical sentence: “Prior to the implementation of the financial enhancement.” That means “Before we fixed our money problems.”
Believe it or not, this is the language that people in authority in America routinely use—officials in government and business and education and social work and health care. They think those long Latin words make them sound important. It no longer rains in America; your TV weatherman will tell that you we’re experiencing a precipitation probability situation.
He almost sounds like some Norse reconstructionist Pagan bashing the “soft Mediterranean cultures” there, doesn’t he.
But don’t blame the Roman Empire. Blame the writers of the 16th-19th centuries who imported Latin terms because they sounded grander and because they had all studied Latin in school.
Write with Anglo-Saxon action verbs as much as possible, and your writing will be better. You can deposit that knowledge with certainty in your financial institution take it to the bank.