We worry about people “hoarding” too many dogs. Not in Muslim areas, where having any dog apparently makes you worth killing.
From Thailand, for instance:
Buddhist monks have been beheaded, Buddhist teachers slain, and leaflets distributed around Buddhist villages warning that raising dogs and drinking alcohol are offensive to Muslims.
That makes me a target on three counts, at least. How comforting.
Cross posted to Nature Blog.
Timothy White started Shaman’s Drum: A Journal of Experiential Shamanism & Spiritual Healing in the mid-1980s, at the same time that Jay Kinney started Gnosis: Journal of the Western Inner Traditions.
In fact, I met both publishers on the same evening in San Francisco, at a publishing gathering where they introduced their new journals. As a graduate student in religious studies, I ended up writing frequently for Gnosis, but I always subscribed to Shaman’s Drum as well.
Both suffered a big hit in the late 1990s when a major distributor went under, owing them both significant sums of money. Jay Kinney closed Gnosis in about 2000 and went on to other projects; Timothy White and his wife, Judy, struggle on in Oregon.
Their latest plan is to organize a series of benefit auctions on eBay, offering such items as “traditional shamanistic craft items (drums, medicine bags and other items), original shamanistic paintings, collector’s prints and photos . . . . back issues and/or discount certificatesfor workshops and tours advertised in the magazine.”
They are also soliciting donated items to sell.
News of upcoming auctions is supposed to be posted on the Web site. It’s not there yet, but check back later.
How do you know that Yule is coming? Is it the Christmas music in stores? Is it the Sun setting at 4 p.m., which means I have to stop my project of staining the exterior walls of the new cabin addition?
Or is realizing that you are standing beside a photocopier running off 25 copies of the final exam, which means the semester is almost over–hurray?
The quiet sound is me gloating.
I was surprised at the first sentence though. Are they still forcing us to change? (Are there “ministries”?) Don’t they know that our preference is genetic?
I am referring referring to this event, of course.
As Robert Anton Wilson pointed out many years ago, N.S. de Guadalupe is a real goddess.
Stay on Her good side. You buy the candles in almost any supermarket these days.
If I were not teaching rhetoric, I would not have found Michael Medved’s column on Sgt. Patrick Stewart’s pentacle memorial while looking for a good political column for my students to analyze.
After insulting the religion–“it’s a trendy, phony potpourri of druidical, primitive and New Age elements that’s more a pagan cult than an organized faith”–Medved grudgingly admits that “the Constitution leaves no room for the government to discriminate against its adherents.”
Uh, OK, thanks, I guess. And we are a Pagan cult, in fact, if you want to be technical about it.
Meanwhile, his fellow Townhall.com columnist Dennis Praeger, who has been bent out of shape over a Muslim Congressman wanting to take his oath of office on the Koran, responds to his critics and adds,
I am a Jew (a non-denominational religious Jew, for the record), and I would vote for any Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Mormon, atheist, Jew, Zoroastrian, Hindu, Wiccan, Confucian, Taoist or combination thereof whose social values I share.
A couple of nights ago I guest-lectured via telephone to Jeffrey Kaplan’s class in new religious movements at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh.
I said that I thought that Paganism–Wicca in particular–was becoming the new designated Other on the American religious scene–and these columnists bear me out. Get used to “What about Wicca?”
However, I expect that it will be a long time before the first Wiccan elected to the House of Representatives has to worry about on which book to swear an oath. For the record, no holy book is required anyway.
Christians in Albemarle County, Va., get permission to put church announcements in school kids’ “backpack mail.”
Then a Pagan group follows the same, now permitted, procedure.
I saw an ad in The New Yorker for someone who will help your high-school student to write that dreaded college admissions essay
With that in mind, here from my own school’s alumni magazine is an Admissions Department insider’s view of that genre.
I wonder why they admitted me, though. As I recall, I wrote part of an essay, became frustrated, cut it off abruptly, and made up the balance by including some of my “brilliant” high-school poetry. Maybe they had a “rebellious poet” slot open.
Jason Pitzl-Waters links to a survey showing “nature religion” to be the fastest-growing religious category in Australia.
Jim Lewis, a long-time scholar of new religious movements, presented a similar roundup last week at AAR-SBL. Interestingly, he found the number of Pagans in English-speaking countries to come in consistently at about 0.1 percent. (That’s one-tenth of one percent.)
I think that should Pagans reach about the 2-percent mark, it would be a sort of tipping point. What that Paganism would look like, I have no idea.
“Growth” is a debatable term, of course. The steering committees for each AAR program unit are supposed to track how many people come to each session for institutional-research purposes. At one of the new religious movements sessions, an attendee cracked, “Let’s just be like the Scientologists and count everyone who comes through the door [as a member].”
Yeah. Whose numbers do you trust?