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.”

Out, sugar demons, out!

One of M.’s students at the community college writes in a psychology paper that while she herself is a diabetic, she controls her diabetes “through diet and exorcise.”

Once again we see that the spellchecker is no substitute for literacy. On the other hand, Ted Haggard could add this to his ministry of spiritual warfare.

Jay’s at it again

Jay Allen has revived his Kensho Godchaser blog, and it is back in my permanent blogroll. His other blog is The Zero Boss.

More grad school advice

From the Recovering Academics Live Journal, good advice for grad students.

Then there are the unintended consequences of postgraduate studies.

On the undergraduate-teaching front, meanwhile, I see in my referral logs a number of search engine requests for “summary analysis of …” or “notes on …” followed by a book title. You haven’t written that paper yet, have you. And now you’re cutting corners. Remember, professors know how to use Google too.

Giving good headship

Jeff Sharlet of The Revealer has way too much fun dissecting Christian men’s self-help books. Some quotes:

Women can’t get enough of good headship, but a man must be careful; a woman’s hunger for his headship may lead him to abuse its potency through the sin of anger. . . .

But with Christian womanhood restored and redeemed, a crucial character in the Christian conservative morality play has gone missing: the seductress. It is no longer acceptable to speak of loose women and harlots, since sexual promiscuity in a woman is the fault of the man who has failed to exercise his “headship” over her. It is his effeminacy, not hers, that is to blame. And who lures him into this spiritual castration? The gay man.

Sharlet thinks about how the Christian-versus-culture debate is framed in terms of homosexuality. Personally, I think the “harlot” image is still present, and had I nothing better to do, I would write at length about how so much of organized religion deals with controlling female sexuality.

Wicca, by contrast, exalted and attempted to ritualize sexuality, with mixed results. Both the polyamorous and the monogamous agree that sexuality has a sacred dimension, but just how that works in daily life continues to be debated, usually in venues closed to outsiders.

The purgatory of peer review

In a this case, the kind of car your mom drives is factored in. (Thanks to Scribbling Woman.)

Looking through a Sportsman’s Guide catalog, I saw this portable fireplace. It is copper with a wrought iron stand, made in the former imperial province of Anatolia.

Lift out the grill, and it seems to cry out for libations, which you pour from the patera. You can see a fine silver one from the sacred spring of Minerva Sullis in Bath, while here is a pewter version.

Detailed instructions for serious Romans are here, while what you might call the children’s version is here.

It’s a pity that the stand does not bring the firebowl up to waist height. I need an ironworker to make me a tripod.