“The Village”
Those merry pranksters at Landover Baptist Church are Share this:
Let the games begin
Jason Pitzl-Waters at Wild Hunt blogs about the revived Nemean Games, where you do not have to be a world-class athlete to run the same race as did the ancient Greeks.
Meanwhile, PBS will be running two episodes next week of The Real Olympics, complete with the gore of chariot racing, the blood and flies from the sacrifices . . . or at least as much as can be put on television.
‘Give it up to the Goddess’
I confess that I had not looked at Eurotrash’s blog for a while, so I missed this account of her summer solstice trip to Avebury.
It is safe to say that it provides a certain balance to the stories told by some friends who spent the night there this past solstice.
Her link to Children of the Stones did not work for me, so here is another guide to its episodes.
Missing Texts
The Wiccan/Pagan times has reviewed Graham Harvey’s and my anthology, The Paganism Reader. So far, no review (of two that I have seen) has noted our big, accidental omission, James Frazer’s The Golden Bough.
It is easy to see what happened. Neither Graham nor I make any use of this monument of 19th-century anthropology. We tend to think of it as an exhibit in the Museum of Ideas. But it was influential in the Pagan revival and it still pops up on Pagan reading lists because of all that “sacrificial king” stuff: examples here and here.
By the time I thought to include it, Routledge did not want to hear of any more changes, and we were already 300 UK pounds over budget on permissions. (Someone is still making money off Rudyard Kipling, for example.)
It hurt me more to leave out Sappho’s invocation of Aphrodite, because all her surviving poems still speak with a fresh voice, even though she lived more than 2,500 years ago.
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.