{"id":144,"date":"2004-03-17T17:30:00","date_gmt":"2004-03-17T17:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=144"},"modified":"2004-03-17T17:30:00","modified_gmt":"2004-03-17T17:30:00","slug":"144","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=144","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Heresies<\/strong><\/p>\n

Yesterday by the photocopier, Colleague A (Political Science) cornered me. She and Colleague B (Psychology) had been at the local Barnes & Noble store and seen the B&N edition of The Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics<\/em>, which I wrote in 1991 when a friend was acquisitions editor at ABC-Clio<\/a> and invited me to do a book for them. “Is that our<\/em> Chas?” wondered Colleague A. That’s what happens when you teach in one field and write in another!<\/p>\n

Frankly, I was amazed a few years ago when B&N reprinted it. The check was a nice surprise too. Now it’s apparently out of print. I had been curious who bought the book, aside from the original intended market of librarians. This review<\/a> from British e-zine editor Matthew Cheeseman gives one suggestion. (The lower trade-book price doesn’t hurt, either.) <\/p>\n

A little Googling: here is an someone with an online Christian ministry building a virtual homily<\/a> around my introduction. (Unlike Cheeseman, Timothy King evidently does not Google his sources.)<\/p>\n

And speaking of a different sort of “heresy.” My humor column from the earlier, print version of “Letter from Hardscrabble Creek” on “Training Your Soul Retriever” pops up on an actual dog-training web site<\/a>. (Scroll down). Or you can read it here<\/a>. It was a gentle parody of retriever experts such as Eloise Heller Cherry and Richard Wolter. What would happen if Wolter collaborated with neoshaman Michael Harner<\/a>?<\/p>\n

Reincarnation<\/strong><\/p>\n

A study<\/a> from Barna Research Group on beliefs about the afterlife shows 18 percent of Americans accepting the idea of reincarnation–even some evangelical Christians. Other contradictions abound as well. Thanks to Joe Perez<\/a> for the original link<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Roller Coaster<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a little bit of a haze from some hay-fever medication, I finished the first draft of Her Hidden Children<\/em>, my book on the rise of contemporary Paganism (mainly Wicca) in America, over the weekend.<\/p>\n

Now I have started the complete re-editing, and that means I am on the emotional roller-coaster. It’s pretty good. It’s pathetically sophomoric. I have some original insights. No, it’s just a miserable dribble from the cauldron of scholarship. It would have been better if I could have written it ten years ago; now it is dated, and who will care, anyway? No, I had some original insights. <\/em><\/p>\n

And so on and on and on.<\/p>\n

The only thing to do is to get it into the publisher’s hands (only a year and a half late) as soon as possible and move on to the next thing.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, I am awaiting my copies of The Paganism Reader<\/em><\/a>. Co-editor Graham Harvey says–and the illustration here, from Routledge’s web site, seems to confirm, that Routledge stayed with their utterly dreary cover design.<\/p>\n

In the real world:<\/em> I saw my first kestrel, flying low against a strong northwest wind, while driving to the university today. I left home wearing a leather jacket over a fleece vest, but at some point realized that I need not need the Jeep’s heater on (not that a 1973 CJ-5’s heater produces all that much warmth), and by the time I reached Pueblo, I was shedding layers. Spring comes on in a rush. When is the next blizzard due?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Heresies Yesterday by the photocopier, Colleague A (Political Science) cornered me. She and Colleague B (Psychology) had been at the local Barnes & Noble store and seen the B&N edition of The Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics, which I wrote in 1991 when a friend was acquisitions editor at ABC-Clio and invited me to do […]<\/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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-144","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6xQTg-144","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6128,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6128","url_meta":{"origin":144,"position":0},"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":1134,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1134","url_meta":{"origin":144,"position":1},"title":"Two Compliments in One Week","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 29, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"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\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Christianity\"","block_context":{"text":"Christianity","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=christianity"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"http:\/\/www.assoc-amazon.com\/e\/ir?t=chascli-20&l=as2&o=1&a=0874366003","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1736,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1736","url_meta":{"origin":144,"position":2},"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":[]},{"id":1268,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1268","url_meta":{"origin":144,"position":3},"title":"Black Metal Music: ‘Abiding and Transcendent’","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"December 16, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"The wide world of academia\u00a0 includes Buffy Studies and edited collections published by serious presses on the legal aspects of Harry Potter's world.So why not a quasi-academic symposium on black-metal music?He quoted lyrics from the face-painted, early-1990s Norwegian black-metal bands Gorgoroth and Immortal; he framed black metal as respecting some\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"music\"","block_context":{"text":"music","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=music"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7925,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7925","url_meta":{"origin":144,"position":4},"title":"Passing of Nikki Bado","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 22, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"I was just informed today of the passing of an old friend and colleague in Pagan studies, Nikki Bado, who taught at Iowa State University. She had been on medical leave for the last year or so, and apparently suffered a heart attack after her last surgery. I have forgotten\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"nikki","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/04\/nikki.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1113,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1113","url_meta":{"origin":144,"position":5},"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":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144","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=144"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=144"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=144"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=144"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}