Pagan Studies in the Academy (AAR Musings, Part 3)

I mentioned earlier an attempt by scholars of contemporary Paganism to gain program-unit status in the American Academy of Religion.

Good news from Cat McEarchern, who has been doing the heavy lifting on the proposal:

We got it. I heard just a few minutes ago that the AAR Program Committee approved the proposal for the Contemporary Pagan Studies Consultation. There was apparently only a brief discussion and many of the members of the committee seemed to think that approval was a given. So people outside our field have been noticing all the work we’ve been doing and the growth of Paganism as a religion.

It’s time to start thinking of something that I can submit for next year’s session.

I will post a link to the Call for Papers when it is ready.

It’s so nice to be noticed

By Belisarius’ definition here, all religions would be “fake,” insofar as they were given form by human beings. If Belisarius were writing as a militant atheist, he would be more convincing. Unfortunately, Ship of Fools is a Christian Web site, and an entertaining one at that. Check out the “mystery worshipper.”

Happy Chrismahanukwanzakah to you

Barraged by comment over holiday-related squabbles in the state capital, I especially enjoyed this animated greeting. (A fast connection helps.)

In an ecumenical spirit, M. went Chrismahanukwanzakah shopping today at the Holy Cross Abbey winery.

When I was a young Pagan, I never let the “C-word” cross my lips if I could possibly say “Yule” instead. Now I hardly care. When a Salvation Army bellringer wished me “Happy Holidays” last week after I put some money in the kettle, I almost snapped back, “I expect to hear ‘Merry Christmas’ from you! Where’s your pride?” But that response would not have been in the Chrismahanukwanzakah spirit. (Thanks again to GetReligion for the link.)

Fun with Visitor Logs

This blog entry was the first hit when someone typed the search terms “Hellenistic VW bus” into Google. Someone else managed a convoluted scriptural exegesis involving VW buses, hippes, and the apostle Paul on a Segway human transporter.

La Virgen as a Goddess

Today’s Denver Post dips a toe into the water with this story suggesting the the Virgin of Guadalupe might be a goddess–or at least a pop icon.

“Many of us are working to claim her larger cosmological meaning as earth mother,” says scholar China Galland, author of Longing for Darkness: Tara and the Black Madonna.

Robert Anton Wilson made much the same point nearly 30 years ago in an essay in the long-gone Llewellyn magazine Gnostica, but who was he? Just some pulp-fiction writer in a “fringe” publication, not “mainstream media.”

Journalists and new religions

Being a former newspaper reporter and someone whose religion by academic standards is “new,” The Revealer’s review of Sean McCloud’s Making the American Religious Fringe: Exotics, Subversives, and Journalists, 1955-1993(University of North Carolina Press, 2004)went right through me.

McCloud contends that since the 1950s, mainstream magazines like Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report have tarred and feathered any group that displayed high levels of zeal, dogma or emotion. Whatever cultural stereotypes would make these groups look most peripheral and abnormal were thrown at them. Sometimes this meant lightly mocking them, at other times representing them as simply offering brain candy for poor people, and very often giving the impression that all “cults” were lead by charismatic serial killers and rapists who had turned their followers into zombies.

I’ve been on both sides of this one: I have agonized over poor reportage on contemporary Paganism, yet in my early-1980s pieces on such groups as The Way International and the Church Universal and Triumphant (a/k/a Summit Lighthouse), was I guilty of what McCloud calls “push[ing] these groups to the periphery as a way of reinforcing their own position in the center”? But which “center” was that? Certainly not a mainstream Protestant center. A secularist center disguising my Pagan identity?

Reviewer Gal Berckerman does not totally buy into McCloud’s use of certain social theorists; I will have to read this book to see if I do.

Canada’s First Pagan Conference

Gaia Gathering, billed as Canada’s first national Pagan conference, is planned for May 20-23, 2005, at the University of Alberta in Edmonton.

Panel discussions include topics such as Pagan paths, Paganism in the various regions of Canada, interacting with the mainstream community, forming ‘churches’, marrying rights, Pagan parenting, living our beliefs in an environmentally sensitive world, Pagan Chaplaincy, and much more…

A discussion group is here, or visit the official Web site.

CES Founder Honored Online

A eulogy page to Church of the Eternal Source co-founder Don Harrison is now online. It loads slowly if you have a dialup connection. I mentioned him earlier here.

A Fistfight at the Poets’ Café

When I was about 15, I saw Jean Cocteau’s Orfée, a film based on the Greek legend of Orpheus the poet, his wife, Eurydice, and their journeys into Hades.

Most of it went right by me. I was not prepared for its intensity nor its shamanic overtones. All I really remembered were Death’s outriders on their motorcycles.

I watched it again last night and was amazed. Made in 1949, it is still a compelling film. This film has the imperious logic of a dream: you don’t know exactly why things are happening as they do, but they are “right” all the same. Surrealist poetry coming from the radio of a Rolls-Royce? Of course.

All of this is done in black-and-white with a minimum of special effects.

Alexander and the Critics

I still have not seen Alexander, but Rogue Classicism is tracking critical reaction, particularly from the Greeks.