Haifa Wehbe Watch

Ever since my original post about Lebanese singer Haifa Wehbe
(or Wahbi), this blog has been receiving sporadic hits from the Middle East: Israel, Syria, Egypt, Dubai . . .

Apparently she and some of her peers have really undermined traditional Arab ideas of beauty.

But I say this to her fans:

“Some would say an army of cavalry, others of infantry, others of ships, is the fairest thing on the dark earth, but I say it’s whatever you’re in love with.”

Those lines are from the ancient Greek poet Sappho. Read Sappho, and understand.

Where the weekend went

To the detriment of my students, I spent most of the past weekend editing the first issue of the “new” Pomegranate: The Journal of Pagan Studies. To help the process go faster, I asked the aid of my old friend Michael McNierney, who not only teaches but has written for The Pom in the past, as well as possessing strong editorial skills. Peer-reviewers of academic journals are normally paid in the coin of glory, but I was happy to share food, drink, and some of the old .45 ACP ammunition that I inherited from my late father.

The Revealer

When I left (I thought) journalism to go to graduate school in religious studies, I thought that one possible later career path would be to be journalist specializing in real religion reporting, as opposed to merely retyping churches’ news releases.

That path was not taken, but others have taken it, and a new way to follow religion-reporting is The Revealer, a blog based at New York University.

From a current entry:

“The religious language with which Disney sold its Celebration [planned community in Florida] and with which buyers bought it isn?t coincidental. The town was — is — the most stunning example of civic religion aestheticized, an extreme-case scenario of gated communities and ?new urbanism? throughout the country, the realization the impulse to create through quaint, storybook settings the community once provided by more stringent faiths.

“But all good things must come to an end, and so Disney embraces evolution rather than creationism by putting its Garden of Eden on the block and announcing plans to build elsewhere.”

I am flattered that Revealer’s “Links–Pagan” page includes this blog and also The Pomegranate, which is taking a lot of psychic energy now as I prepare the first issue with our new publisher.

The Revealer

When I left (I thought) journalism to go to graduate school in religious studies, I thought that one possible later career path would be to be journalist specializing in real religion reporting, as opposed to merely retyping churches’ news releases.

That path was not taken, but others have taken it, and a new way to follow religion-reporting is The Revealer, a blog based at New York University.

From a current entry:

“The religious language with which Disney sold its Celebration [planned community in Florida] and with which buyers bought it isn?t coincidental. The town was — is — the most stunning example of civic religion aestheticized, an extreme-case scenario of gated communities and ?new urbanism? throughout the country, the realization the impulse to create through quaint, storybook settings the community once provided by more stringent faiths.

“But all good things must come to an end, and so Disney embraces evolution rather than creationism by putting its Garden of Eden on the block and announcing plans to build elsewhere.”

I am flattered that Revealer’s “Links–Pagan” page includes this blog and also The Pomegranate, which is taking a lot of psychic energy now as I prepare the first issue with our new publisher.

The Revealer

When I left (I thought) journalism to go to graduate school in religious studies, I thought that one possible later career path would be to be journalist specializing in real religion reporting, as opposed to merely retyping churches’ news releases.

That path was not taken, but others have taken it, and a new way to follow religion-reporting is The Revealer, a blog based at New York University.

From a current entry:

“The religious language with which Disney sold its Celebration [planned community in Florida] and with which buyers bought it isn?t coincidental. The town was — is — the most stunning example of civic religion aestheticized, an extreme-case scenario of gated communities and ?new urbanism? throughout the country, the realization the impulse to create through quaint, storybook settings the community once provided by more stringent faiths.

“But all good things must come to an end, and so Disney embraces evolution rather than creationism by putting its Garden of Eden on the block and announcing plans to build elsewhere.”

I am flattered that Revealer’s “Links–Pagan” page includes this blog and also The Pomegranate, which is taking a lot of psychic energy now as I prepare the first issue with our new publisher.

The Revealer

When I left (I thought) journalism to go to graduate school in religious studies, I thought that one possible later career path would be to be journalist specializing in real religion reporting, as opposed to merely retyping churches’ news releases.

That path was not taken, but others have taken it, and a new way to follow religion-reporting is The Revealer, a blog based at New York University.

From a current entry:

“The religious language with which Disney sold its Celebration [planned community in Florida] and with which buyers bought it isn?t coincidental. The town was — is — the most stunning example of civic religion aestheticized, an extreme-case scenario of gated communities and ?new urbanism? throughout the country, the realization the impulse to create through quaint, storybook settings the community once provided by more stringent faiths.

“But all good things must come to an end, and so Disney embraces evolution rather than creationism by putting its Garden of Eden on the block and announcing plans to build elsewhere.”

I am flattered that Revealer’s “Links–Pagan” page includes this blog and also The Pomegranate, which is taking a lot of psychic energy now as I prepare the first issue with our new publisher.

Inventing Jane Harrison

I have received Mary Beard’s The Invention of Jane Harrison–there goes the evening. (And all hail the interlibrary loan staff for producing it so quickly.)

Ronald Hutton writes of Harrison in his book The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft:

“Savagery and barbarism both frightened and excited her. She admitted that ‘ritual seizes me: a ritual dance, a ritual procession and vestments and lights and banners, moves me as no sermon, no hymn, no picture, no poem has ever moved me.'”

She was both Puritan and would-be Bacchante in the same body, a fascinating character, described when lecturing at Cambridge as “a tall figure in black drapery, with touches of her favorite green and a string blue Egyptian beads, like a priestess’s rosary.” Hutton suggests that she did much to create the notion of a Great Goddess who preceded the familiar Greek pantheon. He quotes Beard, so now I will see what Beard has to say.

Beard herself describes the myth of Harrison thus in her preface:

“Jane Ellen Harrison changed the way we think about the ancient Greeks; she infuriated the academic establishment at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries with her uncompromising refusal to play the submissive part; she fell repeatedly and hopelessly in love–usually with entirely unsuitable men, who were also her academic colleagues; she gave some of the most remarkably theatrical lectures that the University of Cambridge has ever seen; in the very male intellectual world of a century ago, she put women academics and women’s colleges (dangerously) on the map.”

An interested bystander

. . . is all that I am in the Kennewick Man case, but I enjoyed this post from Moira Breen’s Inappropriate Reponse blog. You might like this post as well on the whole sacred-lands issue. British Pagans, for instance, continue to pester English Heritage, etc., about sacred sites management–wanting a say, at least–but, in my experience, most are eager to learn what archaeology tells them. Unfortunately, it’s not always that way.

Bang, Bang, You’re Legal

>Instead of writing or working on spring-semester syllabi, I spent Saturday immersed in gun culture, taking the required pistol-handling course so that I can apply for my concealed-carry permit. (Colorado is a “shall issue” state, meaning that the county sheriff must give you the permit if you pass the course, pay the fee, and are not a convicted felon, mental patient, or otherwise fail the pro forma background check.)

At 10 a.m. I reported to the Cactus Flats shooting club with two small-caliber pistols (I was indecisive up until the last moment about which to bring), protective ear muffs, shooting glasses (rose-tinted lenses that turn the sky Martian indigo and the arid landscape almost Martian orange), and ammunition.

My four fellow students were all in their fifties or sixties–one man probably over 70–and all of us lifelong shooters. (One man had had a concealed-carry permit in Seattle already.) Consequently, the morning instruction session was, shall we say, leisurely, conversational, and fairly cursory, although I picked up a minor point or two. After lunch we demonstrated that we could all hit the silhouette targets at short range, and we learned some useful things about practicing for “the gravest extreme,” to use Massad Ayoob’s phrase. When the class certificate arrives, I can do the paperwork for the permit.

But why? Other than when hunting, I do not normally go around armed. Once in twelve years in this house–just last month–did I strap on a revolver for the night-time dog walk up through the woods and down a dark road, because I had seen a mountain lion here the night before and a prison escapee was possibly in the area (he was captured elsewhere in the county). Rationally, therefore, I could say that I want the permit primarily for when I have a pistol in the truck when traveling, especially in other states that honor Colorado’s permits. (New Mexico just passed its own >concealed-carry law, so maybe they will sign a reciprocity agreement soon with us.) The permit adds a layer of legal protection.

And it is also because an armed citizenry bothers the bejesus out of authoritarians of all political stripes. (Do I think that George W. Bush really endorses the Second Amendment in his heart anymore than Senator Joe Lieberman does? No, I don’t.)

Ecotheology recognizes Paganism

Graham Harvey of the Open University in Britain has guest-edited the latest issue of Ecotheology: The Journal of Religion, Nature and the Environment, which has a new subtitle and a new publisher, Equinox Publishing Ltd., London.

Ecotheology, which formerly had a largely Christian focus, is now broadening its reach, and the latest issue “aims to consider the ways in which places have influenced or perhaps actively engaged with the evolution of particular religions, and the ways in which religious people have engaged with particular places,” to quote Harvey’s introduction.

Contents include these articles:

“Orchestrating Sacred Space: Beyond the ‘Social Construction’ of Nature” by Adrian Ivakhiv

“Imagining Gaia: Perspectives and Prospects on Gaia, Science and Religion” by Grant H. Potts

“Smokey and Sacred: Nature Religion, Civil Religion, and American Paganism” by Chas S. Clifton

“‘Gaia told me to do it’: Resistance and the Idea of Nature within Contemporary British Eco-paganism” by Andy Letcher

“Reclaiming the Ecoerotic: Celebrating the Body and the Earth” by Sylvie Shaw

“Covenanting Nature: aquacide and the Transformation of Knowledge” by Laura Donaldson.

The invention of ‘Goth’ style?

From David Clay Large’s Where Ghosts Walked: Munich’s Road to the Third Reich, a cultural and political history of the city from the late 1800s through the rise of the Nazi party, comes this description of an avant-garde cabaret, The Eleven Executioners:

“After the opening song came an appearance by the resident femme fatale, Marya Delvard, an extremely thin woman with flaming red hair, black-rimmed eyes, and luminescent skin. Dressed in a long black gown and bathed in violet light, she looked as though she had just crawled out of a coffin. Hardly moving or changing her pitch, she moaned songs about dawning sexuality, suicide, and murder. ‘She was frightfully pale,’ recalled the writer Hans Carossa. ‘One thought involuntarily of sin, vampirically parasitical cruelty, and death . . . She sang everything with languid monotony which she only occasionally interrupted with a wild outcry of greedy passion.'”

The year was 1901.