Why was the shoe in the well?

I love this sort of news.

These should be easy times

The semester refuses to let go. The director of composition dumps a file folder of papers on me, which I am to read to help her evaluate one of the part-time faculty.

I feel for the instructor, a “freeway flier,” someone teaching part-time for miserable Colorado wages ($1,300-$1,500 per course) at several colleges in order to try to make a living. S/he might be teaching as many as seven courses, which is two people’s work load for writing classes.

Meanwhile, a former student, a “non-traditional” (in his 40s) stopped by today. He wants to enter the M.A. program.

“So you can make $1,300 per class teaching in the community college?” I asked.

“It beats $6 an hour,” he said. Maybe. But perhaps he could get a better-paying job in a rural high school, many of which are desperate for teachers as the Baby Boomers retire. It is possible now to be hired and then to pick up the education courses.

I should be sitting back to read Alan Cameron’s Greek Mythography in the Roman World to learn something about how the Greek myths were massaged (and invented) to suit Roman religio-political uses. But I also need to explore why the wipers on my old Jeep CJ-5 have quit. (No, I don’t think it’s the switch or the fuse that is bad.) Jeep first, then Classics.

Pagan Studies in the Academy

A list of papers to be presented at the Pagan Studies program unit of the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in November is posted on the Pagan Studies web site.

The AAR has not yet published its program book with times and places; that information will be added as soon as it becomes available.

The missing hyperlink

It is customary in the blogosphere to link to items that you are quoting–unless you are afraid, apparently, that your readers might actually follow that link.

For instance, conservative Catholic blogger Amy Welborn (my cyber-neighbor at Blog Heaven) recently viewed with alarm a Wiccan’s writing on sexual predators in the Wiccan community.

The comments are . . . interesting.

But what is missing? There is no hyperlink. Had she placed one, readers might have seen that essayist Lisa McSherry mentioned Catholic sexual predators as well. (Read McSherry’s entire essay here on the Witches’ Voice site.) Everything else that Welborn posts is hyperlinked–until she deals with Wicca.

Selective quoting works best when no one can double-check you.

Vintage clothing patterns and a need to be bitchy

My mother at one point in her life was a high-school home-economics teacher. My older sisters, therefore, learned to sew. They had as much choice in the matter as young Joseph Ratzinger had in joining the Hitler Youth. Clothing patterns were part of the domestic landscape when I was young, which is why I was so delighted with Threadbared, a site born from “a love of all things vintage and all things snarky.”

Student paper gets it right

The Orion, published at California State University-Chico, published an article on Wicca that gets the history right–no “unbroken tradition from the Stone Age” stuff.

Perhaps that’s because they interviewed one of the leading scholars, who is right there on their campus.

And don’t miss the hard-hitting article on campus squirrels.

Maying in Maine

Michael Bérubé is a Maine photographer whose blog, Another Maine, is a non-touristy photo-documentary of Maine life. (Don’t confuse him with academic blogger Michael Bérubé.)

Recently he attended the Popham Beach celebration of Beltaine.

He comments, “As the modern era of NeoPaganism has now been expanding again since the late 1960s, it is interesting to note that such open public celebrations are again as multi-generational an activity today as they were in PaleoPagan days.”

(Thanks to Marilyn Pukkila, who is in a couple of the photos.)

Who am I, and what am I doing?

It’s a good thing that the semester is finished, because my brain is finished too.

My university sets a different class schedule for finals week than for the other weeks of the semester. Each class meets just once, for two and one half hours. The times are calculated to avoid scheduling conflicts.

At 10:30 yesterday morning I walked from my office into the mêlée of students in the corridor. Some of my own students were standing along the walls outside a locked classroom: there were Tom, Gino, Megan, Cheryl . . .

“Hi,” I said,”Do you need me to open that door for you? Do you have a final exam in there?”

I was getting blank looks, looks that asked, “Is he messing with us?” One of the students reminded me, with polite exasperation, that our class had a final, right then and there.

Oops.

That is a small class, and their “final exam” consisted of presenting Web-based writing projects, so all I had to do was step into another room and grab a portable LCD projector.

Back in January, before I came down with the flu and evidently lost brain cells, I had written and distributed my syllabus and class calendar. Earlier this month, I realized that I had listed an incorrect date for the final exam, so I announced the correct date in class and sent all the students an e-mail too. But I forgot to correct my own appointment book.

Devadasi

It’s not just the Pagans talking about sacred sex–and its potential spinoff, sacred prostitution.

Here is an articulate Hindu practitioner. (Notice her shrine page.) She blogs as well.

The juice and the buildings

Michael Strmiska draws my attention to an article published 10 years ago on the transformation of the Unitarian church: “Strained Bedfellows: Pagans, New Agers, and ‘Starchy Humanists’ in Unitarian Universalism.”

According to the author, sociologist Richard Wayne Lee, the denomination had been a heavily rationalist group in the 1960s, characterized by Newsweek in 1967 as “atheists who have not shaken the church habit.”

The UU leadership of the 1980s made a conscious attempt to incorporate more “spirituality” to appeal to younger Baby Boomers and Generation X-ers, leaving many of the old-line non-theistic humanists feeling pushed to the margins.

The “rapid influx of women into ministry” changed the denomination, and “female clergy served as the principle conduit into UU of neopaganism.”

Intuitively, I had tended to see the growth of the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans as the injection of their “juice,” or energy, into a denomination that happened to own large buildings and meeting spaces, something almost no Pagan group could afford. Lee generally confirms this perception, although his purpose includes an academic definition of “cult” that includes UUs, insofar as it accommodates a number of “cult movements.”