Tag Archives: academia

Orthography and the Modern Pagan

Posted on by

One thing I did at the recent American Academy of Religion annual meeting was stop by the University of Chicago Press booth and get the name of the managing editor of the press’s Manual of Style, which is the holy book, all 1,028 pages of it, for editors of academic books and journals—plus many publishers of serious nonfiction.

A petition has been sent to her by Oberon Zell of the Church of All Worlds, etc., as well as to the editors of the Associated Press Stylebook, the holy book of American journalists, about the capitalization of the word “Pagan.” Oberon has lined up forty-some writers and academics in support of the petition, which reads in part,

The current journalistic convention of printing lower case for these terms seems to have originated with the Associated Press Stylebook, first published in 1953.  However, a new era of religious pluralism has emerged over the past sixty years. The terms “Pagan” and “Paganism” are now being capitalized in a variety of publications, texts, documents, and references, including religious diversity education resources such as On Common Ground: World Religions in America, The Pluralism Project, Harvard University, and Inmate Religious Beliefs and Practices, Technical Reference Manual, Federal Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Department of Justice.

You can read the full text here.

So far, the University of Chicago Press has acknowledged receiving it and plans to forward it to its Reference Committee.

This is a worthwhile cause, I think, and it is a battle that I have fought since the early 1990s (at least) when I was writing The Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics for the reference book publishers ABC-Clio. (A friend working there at the time commissioned it.) I won the battle on Pagan — even for ancient polytheists — but lost on BCE/CE versus BC/AD.

As editor of The Pomegranate, I have continued to insist on capital P’s except in direct quotations. This has put me in gentle conflict sometimes with British and other European contributors who favor “pagan” or at most use “Pagan” for self-conscious contemporary new religions and “pagan” for pre-Christian practices. I think that bouncing back and forth is confusing for the reader’s eye.

So the movement to change the stylebooks is underway, although I expect the process to be a slow one.

 

How to Dress for an Academic Conference

Posted on by

This combined annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature starts this evening. As I lay in my Baltimore hotel bed this morning, thinking about what to wear for the day, my mind kept going back to an essay read yesterday, “Conference Chic, or, How to Dress like an Anthropologist.”

Anthropology  . . . religious studies . . . there is about a 90-percent overlap, sartorially if not methodologically.

Carole McGranhan’s piece is full of great quotes:

As one male professor offered, “To my eyes, for the ladies, it is all about the boots/shoes. The guys, it is all about the jacket.”

There are subtle clues about class and region. People pretend to want to hide upper class, but want others to notice their expensive shoes and other articles.

“The only place that scarves are more popular than at an anthropology conference was at an airline hostess convention in the 1970s.”

“I’m also ambivalent about the scarf–they’re so cliché for anthropologists, but they are warm and pretty and useful and I have a lot of them, so… it will be a game time decision.”

“As a biocultural anthropologist is it appropriate for me to wear scarves?”

Why else expect accessories to do all our stylish heavy lifting, conveying cosmopolitaneity, political consciousness, and personal good taste at once? Such familiar, modernist anxieties lurk under our carefully chosen scarves and jackets, worrying that by acknowledging the importance of surfaces we are therefore superficial, which must mean we aren’t intelligent. The bigger the earrings, the smaller the brain, so we seem to think.

Now I must critically re-examine what I packed. Today: blue jeans with well-polished low boots.

Conferences of Interest to Scholars of Paganism and Esotericism

Posted on by

¶  The 6th Israeli Conference for the Study of Contemporary Religion and Spirituality (PDF) includes some Pagan-friendly themes.

¶ The Association for the Study of Esotericism will meet in June at Colgate University in upstate New York.  Egil Asprem has more to say about that one.

¶ The Conference on Current Pagan Studies, held in Claremont, Calif., will be held on Feb. 8–9, 2014. More information will be forthcoming.

Good Advice: “Run Your Own Race”

Posted on by

I hit bottom the summer I turned 36. Part-way through grad school, I took a break to work as managing editor of an outdoor magazine, Colorado Outdoor Journal. (You’ve never heard of it. I needed a job.) In May, the publisher pulled the plug on the magazine, but I had already registered for the June annual conference of the Outdoor Writers Association of America, so M. and I packed up our VW camper and — unemployed — drove to that year’s site, Kalispell, Montana.

At a reception, this guy — call him T. — came up and introduced himself. I did not know his face, but I knew his name: he had written several books I admired and was on the masthead of one of the leading magazines.

As freshmen at Reed College, he said, we had been in the same creative writing class. He remembered me. I had totally forgotten his being there. (He dropped out, started writing. I stayed.)

It wasn’t T’s fault, but in the wee hours one morning on that trip I woke up in the camper and had the nearest thing to a nervous breakdown that I ever had experienced. Everything that I thought I was or would be turned to dust and ashes. I was not suicidal, but I was crushed by an overwhelming sense of failure. No job. Maybe no career. Bills to pay. Taking the wrong path . . .

Someone should have given me this to read: “Run Your Own Race.”

The best advice I’ve received about surviving in the competitive world of grad school was passed down from a colleague: “Kaitlin, make sure to run your own race.” . . . .  Looking around at your colleagues, there will be people publishing more, teaching more, and people who have more extracurricular activities, or more funding. It can be easy to think you don’t measure up. This self-deprecating thinking ignores strategies that can help make you successful and instead fixates on what others are doing.

I learned that lesson as writer, too: Be happy about your friends’ successes, and don’t measure yourself against them. Run your own race.

Why Academics Should Blog

Posted on by

(with examples from religious studies)

Mark Goodacre at NT Blog makes the argument for blogging’s benefits, part of a series of blogger responses (links in his post):

I sometimes wonder whether one should think of publication as being on a continuum, from tweets to blogs to critical notes to articles to introductory books to monographs.  The summit of all publication is the monograph, and the well-written monograph actually takes some real skill and effort.  Tweets, on the other hand, at the other end of the spectrum, are forgotten almost as soon as they are uttered.  Blogs are somewhere in between.  They take a bit more effort than a tweet but like them they are pretty ephemeral.  It’s remarkable just how quickly we forget them, and that’s if we ever read them in the first place.

Now, back to the monograph.

Defining Paganism (1.5)

Posted on by

The first definition of Paganism that I offered, that of Prof. Michael York, should be placed in its context, which was primarily the academic study of religion. (Amazon link to York’s published books.)

When it was published in 2003, academic interest in the study of contemporary (or neo-) Paganism had been growing, but primarily from the point of  view of Paganism as a new religious movement.

Within the academy — and here I speak mainly of the American Academy of Religion, the largest body for such study on this continent (it includes many Canadians too) — even the study of new religious movements was way off to the side. Those scholars themselves were relative newcomers to the AAR, which had its origins in the study of Christianity and which devoted most of its program sessions to textual matters.

York not only situated Paganism  as “a religion, a behavior, and a theology,” he argued that Pagan elements were found in other “world religions” too — not just “Pagan survivals” but behaviors, primarily.

I don’t mean to suggest cause and effect — one book did not do that  — but it was at about the same time that the AAR’s leadership, which had rejected a proposed Pagan Studies program unit — a permanent slot, in other words — in 1997,  relented in 2004 and granted it.

So York helped to forge a sort of non-sectarian (not Wiccan, not Asatru, not Roman reconstructionist, etc.) definition that would change people’s minds to where they no longer thought that the P-word meant “having no religion” or “follower of an obsolete religion from long ago.”

Instead, it would be a type of religion or a way of being religious. Paganism (academic definition) was everywhere.

Nature Religion as She Is Conceptualized in 2013

Posted on by

I am off Thursday to Cherry Hill Seminary’s “Sacred Lands and Spiritual Landscapes” symposium. Although not one of the marquee speakers, I have a small part to play as a respondent for one panel.

What does a respondent do? First, you read all papers in advance. Of course, there is often somebody who has a string of excuses for not sending his or her paper, so (assuming that person does not bail out totally), you hope that you can take some notes during its delivery and extemporize some remarks.

Having heard the presentations, it is your turn to take a few minutes and discuss common themes, opportunities for further research, and the like. It is considered bad form—at least in the conferences that I have attended—to say, “Jane Doe’s paper was jumbled and had nothing useful to say about Problem X.” You might say, however, “Jane Doe rightly draws our attention to Problem X.”

On the other hand, I have heard respondents critique the overall theme of a session as being poorly thought out, so it’s not always all sweetness and light. But the respondent responds constructively, rather than conducting an oral examination.

Cherry Hill is a seminary too, after all, which means some of the presenters engage in more theologizing than I am used to in my corner of religious studies.

To get in the right frame of mind, I have been re-reading parts of Bron Taylor’s Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future, which lays out different aspects of what he calls “naturalistic animism” in particular, that is to say, animism that is does not require any supernatural component but is more of a shared web-of-life experience. Is this the same as the “New Animism”? Perhaps we have a theme for an AAR session here.

This new book, Walking in the Land of Many Gods: Remembering Sacred Reason in Contemporary Environmental Literature by A. James Wohlpart, looks like it might belong on the same shelf. I need to order a copy.

Also related: I have added Adrian Harris’ BodyMind Place blog to the blogroll. A psychotherapist in England, he gives ecopsychology-based workshops in the UK under the name Nature Connection. Here he writes about what happens when he took one of his psychotherapy techniques . . . outdoors!

Some Items of Interest

Posted on by

Some Pagan, occult, and academic news items of interest:

• I did not know that any of the “Group of Seven” were Theosophists — plus other influential Canadian Pagans and occultists in one list.

• “Unintended Consequences of the Affordable Health Care Act” for part-time college and university faculty. In other words, schools are reacting to Obamacare by cutting the hours of adjunct professors.

• I have been saying for ten years (!) that we need more Pagan biography and autobiography. So I was glad to read in The Wild Hunt that Deborah Lipp has written one.

• The Hopi tribal government is upset over an upcoming French auction selling some of their sacred masks. NAGPRA is no help internationally.

Historians say many Hopi artifacts were taken long ago by people who found them unattended in shrines and on altars along the mesas of the Southwest

Because if a shrine does not have a full-time caretaker, it must be “abandoned.” The “vanishing Indian” and all that.

This is interesting too; the American government will help foreign countries recover their artifacts here, but does not protect ours over there:

When a nation like Italy or Cambodia claims ownership of an object in the United States, it typically invokes international accords that require American officials to take up the cases. The Justice Department, for example, recently sent two lawyers to Cambodia as part of an effort to help that country seize an ancient statue that Sotheby’s planned to auction in New York.

The United States does not have similar accords that it could cite in support of the Hopi claim on the Paris auction items. Several experts and activists said the United States had never viewed its own cultural patrimony as a priority because the country is relatively young, has long embraced the concept of free trade and has not historically focused on the cultural heritage issues of American Indians.

Read the rest. Continue reading →

Popularity Contests and Declining Universities

Posted on by

Janice Fiamengo takes on Rate My Professors as a sign of what is wrong with American universities.

Such accusations reveal little about the professor in question; no one ever satisfactorily distinguishes a boring professor from a boredom-inclined student — which is not to suggest that boring professors do not exist, simply that Rate My Professors cannot recognize them. What the comments reveal are students’ assumptions about what they are owed by their teachers and what constitutes a good classroom experience. Most pointedly, they show the extent to which higher education in North America has become a consumer product like any other, catering to client satisfaction and majority appeal. Reading through the comments, one is disheartened not only because so many are crude and illiterate but also because they indicate how deeply most students have imbibed the canard that university is about being entertained and helped to feel good about oneself.

Read the rest: There is even a witchcraft reference.

Rate My Professors probably never would have been created if schools in the 1970s had not started collecting student evaluations, instead of relying on peer evaluations and other methods. That got us to thinking that student opinions mattered right then and there instead in retrospect after a few years of growth.

The funny thing is that in my years of university teaching only once did I see my department chair use someone’s evaluation against them, and that only because he needed some “objective” evidence to support his decision not to rehire a particular adjunct professor.

Otherwise, as long as your numbers came in sort of average, you were OK, and if they were below average, well, that was because you were teaching difficult material and actually making the little darlings work.

I dodged the RMP bullet, but when M. was teaching psychology, one student rated her as “a great teacher, just a little off the wall. but its [sic] all good.” Isn’t “off the wall” appropriate for a psych class? 😉

Parsing Paganism, Rejecting the F-Word

Posted on by

This whole issue of “Pagan fundamentalism,” Pagan identity politics, and related disputes have been giving me a lot of agita.

In fact, I do wish that “the f-word” had never been introduced, because rather than helping the conversation, it shuts it down.

As soon as you refer to someone as a “fundamentalist” or to a movement as “fundamentalism,” you have, within the sub-dialect of the chattering classes, declared that nothing those people say is worthwhile, that they have nothing to teach you, and that they should just sit down and shut up. Or stop calling themselves Pagans, whichever.

Historically, the term “Fundamentalism” was coined by conservative Christian theologians of the early twentieth-century and named after a book series called “The Fundamentals.” In other words, it presented itself as a back-to-the-roots movement.

The Latin word for root is radix, which gives us “radical,” a term (or person) about stripping away everything seen as extraneous and getting “back to the roots,” renewing your tradition. About the same thing, no? Yet it is more acceptable in academia, for example, to refer to one’s self as a “radical,” at least in some quarters, than as a “fundamentalist,” which would suicidal, professionally speaking.

According to Sabina Magliocco — whom I wish had chosen a different word, but she consciously chose it to be provocative — “Pagan fundamentalists” seem to be those who think that they have the truth and who are overly dogmatic.

Prof. Magliocco suggests that in the good old days, practice mattered more than belief, but now some people are getting all “fundamentalist” about belief. Yes, but. In the 1970s, for example, I encountered some very “fundamentalist” American Gardnerian Witches. Some Goddess feminists could be pretty dogmatic too.

But the people taking offense today are not Gardnerians. They tend to come more from reconstructionist Pagan traditions. And they are the ones being targeted by this current discourse, as best I can tell.

Whatever your position on “hard polytheism” is, I tend to have some sympathy with their position because, as stated above, being called a “fundamentalist” is sort of like being called a “racist.” It puts you in a box that it is almost impossible to climb out of — and that is a deliberate rhetorical tactic designed to marginalize a political opponent.

A friend wrote to me of the “childish” polytheists who ought, in his words, to “detach themselves from contemporary Paganism.” (That is, sit down and shut up while the grown-ups are talking.)

No, I would argue, they are as much a part of contemporary Paganism as you or I are. Are we going to slide into heretic-hunting? Is contemporary Paganism going to develop a handy acronym, like those Republicans who accuse fellow party members deemed insufficiently pure of being RINOS (Republican In Name Only)? (Democrats do it too, but they lack a handy acronym.)

As an editor in the field of Pagan studies, I look at Paganism as a way of being religious, not as specific beliefs or specific practices. I want to keep the tent big and broad.

Paganism old and new is creedless and flexible, as Michael York wrote in Pagan Theology: Paganism as a World Religion, yet some have written creeds (Gleb Botkin with the Church of Aphrodite in the 1930s, for example), and we haven’t thrown them off the boat.

Continuing with York, I still like his definition, even though it reads like a legal document:

Paganism is an affirmation of interactive and polymorphic sacred relationship by individual or community with the tangent, sentient, and nonempirical.” (162)

Parse those words carefully, and you will that Prof. York has stretched the tent as far as possible to include the hardest of hard polytheists and the nature-as-source-of-sacred value people, and everything in between. There is room under it for the committed “godspouse” as well as the person whose Paganism is heavily influenced by Jungian psychology. They are both doing religion in a way that we define as “Pagan.”

Here we do come back to the notion of “doing,” but I would allow that one’s “doing” might include relating to gods, spirits, and wights as discreet entities — and talking about it — which seems to be the crux, or a crux, of the current kerfuffle.