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?
Huge Goddess celebration in Mexico
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.
Wicca: trendy, phony, and Constitutionally protected
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.
Be careful what you wish for
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.
Gallimaufry
- Sgt. Patrick Stewart’s memorial pentacle makes the Associated Press newsfeed. That lawsuit against the VA is getting national media attention.
- Two more sites aggregating Pagan-related news items: Green Viking News and The Pagan Activist.
- Find the god you need at God Checker.
Sweaty jocks and pet death
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.
The "fastest-growing" religion?
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?
Gallimaufry
- Abstracts of articles published in The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies are now available online and searchable.
- Advanced Book Exchange is my normal starting place for used or out-of-print books, but it is getting some competition from ChooseBooks.com, which claims to be more selective or something. Naturally I went to their site and searched on my own stuff, and what a surprise to see my junior-year literary magazine from Reed College listed for $49.99. That was not because I had some poems in it; rather, the contributors included Lee Blessing, who became a Pulitzer-winning playwright, and his friend the screenwriter Eric Overmeyer.
- Coming home from AAR-SBL, M. & I had a layover in Chicago, so after coffee at her favorite hangout, Intelligentsia on Jackson Street, we walked down to the Art Institute. (I have a standing date with John Singer Sargent there; he painted like I want to write.)
- My mind still at AAR, I became way too amused at an exhibit titled “Art of the Islamic World: Unity and Diversity.” That could be the perfect all-purpose after-the-colon academic title. “Chicago: Unity and Diversity.” “America in the Jacksonian Era: Unity and Diversity.” “The Corvidae: Unity and Diversity.” “Contemporary Paganism: Unity and Diversity.” Or, as M. suggests, “unity in diversity,” for even more ambiguity. Either one would do. I would tell my freshmen students to try it, except that I don’t think they would understand that I was speaking ironically. I would immediately receive six or eight papers with “Unity and Diversity” in the title!
Pagan Studies and paper management
The Capitol as it looked on my last morning’s walk to the AAR-SBL meeting.
Coming home from the American Academy of Religion-Society for Biblical Literature meeting means an enormous amount of “paper management.” Books, catalogs, receipts, business cards, mysterious scribbled notes, sample copies of journals, maps, newspaper clippings–all are dumped on my desk and need to be sorted out.
Somewhere in the pile is my notebook with about seven pages of “to do” items.
One thing I did hear was an insider’s perspective on the lawsuit against the Veterans Administration over the pentacle on Sgt. Patrick Stewart’s memorial. Thanks to the state of Nevada, he did get his pentacle.
Suffice it to say that the lawsuit may force the VA to reveal that a double standard was employed. There is an old saying: A fish rots from the head.
As I work through that to-do list, I’ll have more to say about our sessions. Meanwhile, here is one bookseller’s take on the last day of the book show..
Amtrak Heaven, Amtrak Hell–and all for Pagan Studies
Regular readers know that M. and I like train travel. We saw both sides of it on our just-completed trip to Washington, DC.
The Southwest Chief was on time to La Junta, Colorado, where we meet it, but the ticket agent was muttering about possible stoppage due to high winds.
Somewhere in western Kansas, we ended up parked for five hours. Apparently there is an Amtrak regulation against prairie travel when winds exceed 50 mph, and according to a crew member, winds at the Dodge City airport were 63 mph. Can those double-decker Superliner cars blow over?
Late to Chicago, we missed our connection on Capitol Limited to Washington, but did make it onto the Lakeshore Limited, which had been held in the station. Thus began the great Rust Belt tour: northern Indiana and Ohio, Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, and down the Hudson River to New York City. This time, our sleeper was one of the one-level Viewliner cars, designed to fit into Penn Station.
I could never keep count of all the old brick warehouses, piles of scrap metal, and empty factories. What is the quarter-mile long three-story white brick building in Utica, New York, that looks empty? There is just so much stuff in this country.
We arrived in New York about 8 p.m. and an Amtrak representative promised us seats on a regional train down to Washington, DC, which would have gotten us there by midnight–eight hours late, but we could live with it.
But what she did not tell us was that a freight train had derailed south of Baltimore, interrupting the “catenary” electrical system and stopping commuter trains in that sector. We got this sad news from the conductor somewhere around Trenton: our train would stop at Philadelphia.
It was too late for a Greyhound bus–the last one had left at 10:15 p.m. The rental car counters were all closed. Amtrak’s Philadelphia agents were flailing around, first promising buses and then saying that there were none, and that Baltimore was worse, anyway.
Eventually, like some other passengers, we partnered with a third traveler and rented a cab. Yes, from Phillie to Washington by taxi, driven by an immigrant Indian driver who knew how to get onto Interstate 95 south, but after that had no idea where he was going.
Neither M. nor I knew our way around either. Fortunately the other guy knew the main roads–and somewhere in the south part of downtown, the brotherhood of cabdrivers was invoked: our driver pulled alongside a DC cab, rolled down his window, and shouted [assume melodious Indian accent]: “Where is Hotel Washington?” And soon we were there, heads hitting the pillow about 3 a.m.
And so I slept until about 10:30 a.m. and then trudged off to the Convention Center, arriving late for the all-day Pagan studies conference, but delighted to be there and able to say that I had paid all that money out of my devotion to Pagan studies.
It was totally worth it.
On the return trip, we were only slightly late into Chicago and right on time in La Junta. Boarding the Southwest Chief in Chicago, we looked around and realized that we were in the same “roomette” in the same sleeping car that we had just vacated six hours earlier. That never happened before. Perhaps it was . . . a sign.
Thursday, Nov. 16, apparently was no picnic for air travelers either. I spoke to one attendee who had been dropped in Pittsburgh and sent by bus to Baltimore. Others had similar stories. The travel system is complex and fragile. One thunderstorm at an airport can back up air travel all around the country, so I cannot be too hard on Amtrak for its high-wind policy.
On the other hand, I have been talking with Customer Relations and will be seeking some sort of refund, having bought Chicago-Washington sleeper tickets but having been dumped in Philadelphia.
Tag: Amtrak