Apocalypse

Worth reading: “The Last Man on Earth,” an essay by Kathryn Joyce at The Revealer, on the enduring power of such books as 1984, The Handmaid’s Tale, and Brave New World. Here is the first paragraph:

“In my father’s favorite dark fantasy he is Mr. Mead of Ray Bradbury’s short story, ‘The Pedestrian’: persecuted for walking alone at night without purpose instead of watching television, as everyone else does in a disturbingly-familiar authoritarian state of the future. That Bradbury’s dystopia sounds a lot like Westchester, where my father grew up, or any other suburb, is of course the real chill — an intended one, one of recognition.”

Nanny-state tendencies, and what about that May Pole?

Recently, British police officers have been forbidden to join the British National Party, a political party which might charitably be described as far-right. More here from Wikipedia.

You don’t like far-right parties? Fine. But the BNP is, as its web site points out, a legal political party in the UK. Imagine an American cop being told, “You will lose your job if you register as Libertarian (or Green).”

In another weird drug-war development, it is seriously suggested that British children could be vaccinated against euphoria.

I don’t mean to pick on the Brits. These same things could happen tomorrow in Canada under the banner of “order and good government.” They could happen the day after tomorrow in the United States under the banner of “The War on (whatever).”

Two incomplete thoughts:

1. As a Pagan, I have strong small-l libertarian feelings. As Judy Harrow once pointed out to me, ours is a “high-choice ethic.” We make up our own minds. Evidently Police Constable Smith is no longer to be trusted to make up his own mind. Nor would the kids be trusted. The less a government trusts the people, the more totalitarian it becomes–even if for the “best” of reasons.

2. Back to the BNP: Take another look at its web page. Click on the link at upper right that says, “”New ‘Land and People’ site launched.” Watch the photos–particularly in the upper right. See that May Pole? Hmm. Does the American political right own “family values”? Does the British political right own (revived) Pagan symbolism?

“There are 60,000 recipes in Italy”

USA Today brings an Italian cooking expert to rate the food at the Olive Garden restaurant chain. (Ah, the typical strip-mall setting shown on the web site.)

“This is bad. This is really bad,” Marcella says. She stares into the bowl. “This is Bolognese sauce?” She reaches for a menu in disbelief.

“I must console myself,” Marcella says. She orders a Jack Daniel’s.

Hat tip to Consumer Whore.

Buffy as spiritual director

This book had to happen: the only part that surprises me is that I had an image of Jossey-Bass as a fairly staid publisher, based on their display at AAR-SBL meetings.

It started out as a joke.

Two academic women were laughing over the absurdity of writing a book about the spirituality of the teen TV show “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” in May 2002. But by fall of that year, Jana Riess, religion book review editor at Publishers Weekly, was writing a book proposal.

Read more from Religion News Blog

It is believed . . .

that I have added D’Alliance, blog of the Drug Policy Alliance, to my blogroll, not least because of this wicked skewering of the “bureaucratic passive voice.”

Stormy afternoon

I have been sitting on the front porch watching a summer thunderstorm roll in over the Wet Mountains First a grey veil is drawn across the most distant ridge, leading up to Hardscrabble Mountain. Holt Mountain, which is nearer, is obscured in turn, and then I can hear the hissing of rain on oak leaves and pine needles as the storm comes closer, and then, suddenly, the first drops are tapping loudly on the metal roof above me. I had already shut down my desktop computer and pulled the plug on the surge protector, since lightning bolts are stabbing downward too. When I go indoors to write on the PowerBook (on battery), syncopated raindrops rattle on the disused stove pipe rising from the study.

It’s been a split day. For two hours I was a landlord, mowing and trimming and fertilizing at the rental cabin, taking advantage of the dry (for a change) morning and the fact that this week’s guests, a thirty-something couple from Denver with their golden retriever, had gone hiking. (They timed it right and were back just ahead of the storm.)

Before and after that, I was an editor and book publicist, compiling a list of possible review sources where Routledge’s New York office might send The Paganism Reader. They know most of the standard religious-studies journals, but they probably do not yet have The Pomegranate in their files, and apparently they do not know about PanGaia either. And chatting on the telephone with the editor of a forthcoming anthology on church-and-state issues about running one of its contributions in The Pomegranate. And replying to an e-mail from yet one more religious-studies graduate student who is working on contemporary Paganism and who needs to be brought up to speed about The Pom, about this year’s Pagan studies conference, and, who knows, about eventually turning her dissertation into a book for AltaMira’s Pagan studies series.

The editorial assistant at Equinox Publishing sent PDF files of ads for some of their books and journals, including The Pom, that will be running in the Association for the Sociology of Religion’s annual meeting program book, and in the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion. That’s wonderful; it is the sort of publicity that we could never have managed earlier when The Pom was basically a two-person operation (Fritz Muntean and Diana Tracy, plus other helpers, and eventually me.) We have also arranged to be added to Religion and Theology Abstracts, which will be a big help for researchers. Fritz has sent them the CD-ROM of back issues, which were never indexed anywhere–five years’ worth!–so one of these days, those will be available to subscribers. There are a couple more databases that we need to be listed in as well. Until then, as far as academic research is concerned, we are invisible, which is no good at all.

Is Starhawk (still) Jewish?

Terry Mattingly of the religion-and-journalism blog GetReligion has posted recently on the difficulties of determining Jewish identity, both for Jews and for journalists.

His post is based on the National Jewish Population Survey of 2000-2001; the link is to a longer article that he wrote. What caught my eye was his line about “non-monotheistic religion,” but then he mentions Islam (?!). And here I was expecting some exploration of the prominence of certain Jewish Pagans.

The survey defined a Jew as someone whose “religion is Jewish, OR, whose religion is Jewish and something else, OR, who has no religion and has at least one Jewish parent or a Jewish upbringing, OR, who has a non-monotheistic religion, and has at least one Jewish parent or a Jewish upbringing.”

I guess people like Mimi “Starhawk” Simos belong in a “hard-to-define, niche spirituality” to newspaper religion writers, to quote Mattingly’s blogging colleague, Douglas LeBlanc.

Here is Jewish commentary from Starhawk’s home town, but it focuses on the dating and marriage issues.

Creating Pagan Identity

Back at my campus office, I discovered a review copy of Witching Culture by folklorist and anthropologist Sabina Magliocco. The publisher’s cover blurb calls it “the first ethnography of this religious movement to focus specifically on the role of anthropology and folklore in its formation.”

I think the meatiest section will be the last, Part III, “Beyond Experience: Religion and Identity” with its two chapters, “The Romance of Subdominance: Creating Oppositional Culture” and “‘The Heart is the Only Nation:’ Neo-Paganism, Ethnic Identity, and the Construction of Authenticity.”

I am just starting to read it, but I can already see that Magliocco takes on the problem of why, in the face of all historical evidence, so many Pagans cling to the myth of the Burning Times and of the antiquity of Wicca, as though it really was a direct survival of the Stone Age and not a twentieth-century creation. She seems to view these issues through the lens of “identity politics,” which probably is as valid an approach as any. I look forward to spending more time with the book.

Why we go to British Columbia

We go to British Columbia to see the big trees, like this Western red cedar in Kokanee Glacier Provincial Park. Although these mountains are well inland–they are the Western ranges of the Canadian Rockies–they catch the storms and produce landscapes that feel in places like the Pacific coast. Here is M. “in church,” with a choir of hermit thrushes.