ABC-Clio<\/a>, and one day when I was in Denver, he took me to lunch and gave me the “What can you write for us?” speech.<\/p>\nI won’t say it is a great book or a classic or anything, but it did make money and it did get me over the hump to where I was writing for an audience, not writing for my professors.<\/p>\n
Then on Wednesday I went to the nearest PetsMart store for dog food and sunflower seeds (wild bird food). The store manager came to help out by serving as a cashier since the check-out line was growing.<\/p>\n
He majored in English and took my rhetoric class a few years ago. I was in his line in the store, and when I came to the counter, he started telling me how useful the class had been, how he still uses some of the concepts of classical rhetoric when he does training classes, and so on.<\/p>\n
Be still, my heart. If you want to make your old professors happy, tell them that you use (or at least occasionally think about) what they taught.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Two nice bits of feedback this week, which are rare enough in the academic-writing life. First, someone emailed me about The Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics, which was my first big project after grad school, back in the early 1990s. I am a fan of medieval history and refer to it on a regular basis. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[24,54,12],"class_list":["post-1134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-christianity","tag-teaching","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-ii","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":1113,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1113","url_meta":{"origin":1134,"position":0},"title":"Copyediting Religion","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 20, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"Orthographic payback is a bitch.For years--starting when I wrote for Gnosis in the 1980s--I was one of those pushing for the capitalization of the words Witch and Pagan when used to describe first, the followers of the new, self-consciously created polytheistic mystery religion and, second, Pagan as a more general\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Christianity\"","block_context":{"text":"Christianity","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=christianity"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":648,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=648","url_meta":{"origin":1134,"position":1},"title":"The encylopedic mind of J.\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 13, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"The encylopedic mind of J. Gordon MeltonThe Los Angeles Times interviews J. Gordon Melton, a major figure in the study of new religious movements.It's often said of academics, but for J. Gordon Melton it's true: He really does have an encyclopedic mind.After all, Melton is the author of the Encyclopedia\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7886,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7886","url_meta":{"origin":1134,"position":2},"title":"CFP: Women in World Religions","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 1, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"Author-scholars are needed for the two volume reference work, Encyclopedia of Women in World Religions: Faith and Culture Across History, to be published by ABC-CLIO Publishing. We seek contributors with expertise in Women, Religion, and History to write articles of 500 to 2000 words, with overview, historical background, and selected\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"reli\"","block_context":{"text":"reli","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=reli"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13059,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=13059","url_meta":{"origin":1134,"position":3},"title":"The Passing of Christian R\u00e4tsch, Magical Ethnobotanist","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"September 23, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"I heard Christian R\u00e4tsch (1957\u20132022) speak in person only once, at a conference in England in the 2000s, shortly after I had bought a book he co-wrote, Witchcraft Medicine: Healing Arts, Shamanic Practices, and Forbidden Plants. I also treasure a recorded lecture of his on henbane beer and such topics,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"ethnobotany\"","block_context":{"text":"ethnobotany","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=ethnobotany"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/Ratsch-300x211.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6128,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6128","url_meta":{"origin":1134,"position":4},"title":"Orthography and the Modern Pagan","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 2, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"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\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1736,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1736","url_meta":{"origin":1134,"position":5},"title":"“Agora”: Pagans vs. Christians or Atheists vs. Religious?","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 3, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Living in the cinematic boonies as I do, I will probably not see Agora until it comes out on DVD. Here is a long dissection of it, from period-incorrect Roman armor to its avoidance of exactly what Hypatia taught: But because the film never bothers to make her neo-Platonist asceticism\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Christianity\"","block_context":{"text":"Christianity","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=christianity"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=chascli-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0874366003\")
<\/em>, which was my first big project after grad school, back in the early 1990s.<\/p>\n