The call for papers for the next annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion is now available online. You will find the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group’s CFP here.
Tag Archives: scholarship
Some Recent Publications Available Online
Some recent publications in or related to Pagan Studies:
• The first issue of Goddess Thealogy: An International Journal for the Study of the Divine Feminine is available for download (PDF, 3.17 MB)
• Videos and PDF files of lectures from the “Demons in the Academy” session at the recent American Academy of Religion meeting are available at the Phoenix Academy website.
• With author Eric Steinhart’s permission, I have uploaded his series of posts on atheism and Wicca as one PDF file.
What Do Pagans Get from Interfaith Activities?
What does “ecumenism” mean when you don’t “all worship the same god”?
Elizabeth Scalia, a/k/a The Anchoress, a Roman Catholic blogger at Patheos, comments simultaneously on posts by another Patheos Catholic blogger and by Star Foster, who manages the site’s Pagan portal. Both of the latter, in Star’s words, hold that “My faith is not a matter of style. It’s not like shoes or purses. It’s not a matter of deciding if I want tacos or pasta for dinner. It’s not something I can change on a whim.”
Scalia’s verdict: “Ecumenism has not been able to say that [not all religions are the same]; it’s been too busy trying to be all things to all people and placing equal values to things that are not equal in anyone’s mind. It’s been a lie.”
She ends up admiring Star for her honesty, at least. But her commenters, many of them, are not convinced. “I couldn’t call myself a Catholic and not tell you that the practice of Witchcraft is evil,” notes one.
Which is why I sometimes wonder why we — Pagans in particular — bother with ecumenical and interfaith activities.
It’s true that I do often feel that religious professionals have more in common with each other and are more able to relate to one another than their congregants and followers are.
We Pagans do not seek unity with the same fervor that the Christians do (even as they splinter more and more). “Ecumenicism” refers to a promotion of unity, of purpose if not of organization, between different Christian bodies.
“Interfaith” has a somewhat different meaning. At times the two words are used interchangeably, but they should not be. Were it not for the American constitutional tradition of religious freedom (and similar traditions in some other Western nations), I do not think that the Pagans would get a seat at the interfaith luncheon table. (Resolutions passed by the United Nations have no effect that I have ever seen.)
So my title is an editorial rather than a rhetorical question. I have just been going over some material related to the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group in the American Academy of Religion — the 2012 call for papers has not yet been posted but soon will be. I don’t know if that topic would fit the “call” perfectly, but a creative person could make it fit. Or write an article for The Pomegranate.
Mall Ninjas of Pagandom
Vengeful Druids poisoned Gerald Gardner because he was an oath-breaker — did you know that?
Probably not, because it never happened.
I got this particular b.s. tossed by a Facebook friend (as opposed to an actual friend), a Druid from Kansas.
I suggested that he might check one of Ronald Hutton’s books on Druidry or even Philip Heselton’s Gerald Gardner and the Cauldron of Inspiration. Even though Heselton missed the obvious about Gardner’s spiritual journey, his basic legwork and research in primary sources is outstanding.
None of this helped, because Kansas Druid just wanted to be abusive under the guise of asking questions about Paganism.
He seemed to have a bee in his bonnet about Gerald Gardner, making various claims such as that in 1947 the Ancient Order of Druids (a more fraternal than religious form of Druidry) ordered its members not to associate with Gardner. (By my reckoning, Wicca did not yet exist in 1947.)
And although he listed Isaac Bonewits as a person he admired, he persisted in claiming that Druids were warriors. Isaac could have set him straight on that, since Isaac was quite interested in the theories of the Indo-Europeanists such as Georges Dumézil, who saw ancient patriarchal I-E societies (from Ireland to India) as “trifunctional,” divided into classes of priests, warriors, and commoners (farmers, artisans) In that hypothesis, Celtic Druids equate with Indian Brahmins as ritual specialists, lore-keepers, etc. — not the aristocratic warrior class.
I thought about pointing that out to the Kansan, but by then I realized that I was dealing with a Pagan mall ninja, someone who just wanted to spew about Gerald Gardner, Wicca, “hippies,” and so forth, fully armored in his ignorance.
The virtual food courts of the Internet are full of them.
The larger point is this: at the recent American Academy of Religion annual meeting, two speakers in one of the Contemporary Pagan Studies sessions talking about walking the line between “pure” scholarship and “advocacy.” We don’t want to be Pagans talking about Paganism for other Pagans—although some in Pagan media seem to expect that we should be doing that—a topic for another post.
Instead, we want to show how larger issues in the study of religions work themselves out in Paganism—or how Paganism can cause other issues to be re-examined, such as the whole sacred materiality/idolatry thread that started at the 2009 annual meeting in Montreal and which is still playing itself out in The Pomegranate.
But there was also discussion of a scholarship of service—I think Ronald Hutton, for one, strives for this in the talks he gives at Pagan gatherings in the UK and in the upcoming documentary on Gerald Gardner with which he is involved.
On the other hand, when people do not want to be exposed to ideas that challenge what they think they know, what can you do? How do you engage them at Orange Julius or Sbarro?
On Becoming a Killer of Zombies
At the Pop Theology blog, another attempt to figure out the zombie craze, via review of a new collection of essays, Triumph of the Walking Dead.
It is based on the AMC series, but goes far beyond it.
From a pop theology perspective, the most interesting essays cover morality, meaning(lessness), personhood, race and gender, and redemption. In his essay, “Take Me to Your Leader,” Jonathan Maberry examines post-zombie morality through Rick’s position of leadership among the survivors. The most fitting conclusion, it seems, is to abandon all concerns of (im)morality because existence in this world requires amorality. Craig Fischer‘s “Meaninglessness: Cause and Desire in The Birds, Shaun of the Dead, and The Walking Dead,” offers a brief but fairly brilliant comparison of the three. Examining the “cause ” of the apocalyptic events of each film and the comic book series sheds informative light on the others. While they may all be related, in varying ways, to sexual desire, they could just as easily all be meaningless. Fischer makes a great case for Hitchcock’s The Birds as a “proto-zombie film” (69).
I still lean somewhat to the idea I was playing with last month, that “zombie apocalypse” is a why to mentally prepare yourself for life-or-death situations without having to consider killing your fellow humans. You always here about how a fighter must at least temporarily dehumanize the enemy—what is more “de-human” than a zombie?
The Ethnographer and the Magicians
At the site freq.uenci.es, described as “a collaborative genealogy of spirituality” (“Ask scholars, writers, and artists what they think of when they think of the word spirituality.”), anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann glosses an anecdote from her time studying British occultists in the 1980s.
Her book Persuasions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England (Harvard U. Press, 1989) still resonates, although not always in ways that Professor Luhrmann intended.
For some, it became a case study in how not to do research on new religious movement. In her article “Psychology of Religion and the Study of Paganism,” published in the collection Researching Paganisms, Melissa Harrington writes, “[Luhrmann’s] resulting thesis presents a rich ethnography, replete with original anthropological material, but with a weak conclusion that has been refuted by practitioners and academics alike.”
In the same volume, sociologist Douglas Ezzy critiques her “methodological atheism,” although he admits that “there is a long history of academic disciplinary boundary maintenance that this argument derives from.”
(Her faculty web page describes the work this way: “Her first project was a detailed study of the way reasonable people come to believe apparently unreasonable beliefs.”)
Ezzy continues, “The methodological atheism at the heart of Luhrmann’s thesis does not derive from an attempt to sensitively understand the experience of Witches, but from her enforced adherence, on pain of significant social sanction, to the atheistic tenets of academe.”
In her defense, you expect a PhD student to be acutely aware of “social sanction.”
I would have to say that Researching Paganisms (Google sample here) was party a response to Luhrmann’s 1980s work, or as the editors wrote, “In particular, it highlights the relationships of researchers with the communities researched, ‘ownership’ of knowledge so created, and problems in presenting a nonmainstream, and seemingly ‘nonrational,’ area within academic discourses across discipline boundaries.”
Astrology Conference Book Available for Preorder
From the announcement:
The ‘Astrologies’ conference, organised by the Sophia Centre, University of Wales Trinity Saint David, at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution on 24-25 July 2010 was the first gathering of academics working in the history and culture of modern astrology. The range of topics explored in the publication of the conference proceedings is broad, and reflects the strik ing diversity of techniques and underlying philosophies which underlie the enduring human perception of meaningful relationships between the heavenly bodies and life on earth. Although astrology has been treated in many scholarly works as a monolithic entity, all of the papers in this book demonstrate one of the paradoxes of astrological thought and practice: the existence of a relative ly stable tradition of cosmological and astral representations and ideas combined with a adaptability that has enabled astrologies to meld with different spheres of human endeavour in a variety of cultures. The papers are grouped into three basic themes: the symbolism of astrologies, the history of astrologies within different cultural con texts, and the practice of various astrologies from both ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ perspectives.
Academic Work on Paganism in Germany
René Gründer shared a link to a monograph series that includes work on contemporary Paganism and shamanism. Information in English, but the books themselves are available only in German.
His web page also contains links to some articles in English.
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
Wikipedia and the Pagan Academics
Last weekend Cara Schulz wrote a piece on the trouble some Pagan writers were having with Wikipedia.
It started when people noticed some Pagan-related entries, such as “Paganistan” being flagged for deletion. Much editorial chat ensued.
Brendan Cathbad Myers, author of The Other Side of Virtue and other books, saw his entry flagged as insufficiently notable.
It looks as though some on Wikipedia are trying to introduce more rigor to the entries, although I would hate to see Pagan-related entries suffer because of that.
Academics, meanwhile, have tended to shun Wikipedia. Many advise their students never to cite it as a source because of its alleged unreliability.
So it caught my attention when I read that some psychologists have decided to embrace it.
Anthony G. Greenwald, a professor of psychology at the University of Washington who was watching the editing demonstration, said he has asked seven students in his “Implicit and Unconscious Cognition” course to work on Wikipedia articles as part of the coursework. “This is repair work,” he said. “There is so much in Wikipedia that is inadequate.” Or plain inaccurate, said Alan G. Kraut, the association’s executive director.
But getting academics to fix it is a tall order,[Harvard psychology professor Mahzarin R.] Banaji admitted. “I know my colleagues won’t really want to write Wikipedia articles. It just won’t be seen as important, because it isn’t going on their CV,” she said.
So the solution is to have graduate students write or revise the Wikipedia entries.
Well, that approach might work for Pagan studies grad students too. I think it is time to propose such a move.