{"id":2145,"date":"2010-12-13T09:06:47","date_gmt":"2010-12-13T16:06:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2145"},"modified":"2010-12-13T12:56:21","modified_gmt":"2010-12-13T19:56:21","slug":"why-we-do-pagan-studies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2145","title":{"rendered":"Why We Do Pagan Studies"},"content":{"rendered":"

During my first semester of graduate school, I was told a cautionary tale. It was about a Christian pastor who went back for a PhD in religious studies. But one day he had had enough. He stood up from the seminar table and exclaimed, “That’s my Jesus<\/em> you’re talking about!”<\/p>\n

The pastor’s reaction is the typical believer\/practitioner one. He expected his advanced studies to “strengthen his faith,” perhaps.\u00a0 He resisted setting aside his Christian truth claims, “bracketing them out,” to use the common expression.<\/p>\n

Read this post at the Religion in American History <\/em>blog <\/a> about an attack on a professor of Catholic Studies who criticized the Roman Catholic hierarchy. The comments, thus far, are intelligent.<\/p>\n

The problem, however, is a constant one\u2014even between Pagan practitioners (I don’t like the term “believers”) and scholars in Pagan Studies, who are indeed mostly but not all<\/em> Pagan practitioners themselves, in some way, shape, or fashion.<\/p>\n

Religious studies is not-theistic, nor is it atheistic. But it is not theology. There is some tension between the two approaches.<\/a> (I should point out that the AAR includes theologians<\/a> too, although some think that the academy is plagued by dangerous religious liberalism<\/a>.<\/p>\n

(On a somewhat bookish online discussion group someone recently claimed that scholars in Pagan Studies pursued their intellectual interests only to gain stature within the Pagan community. Not hardly. For every fan that you may gain, there probably is someone else ready to denounce you as an enemy of true Paganism.)<\/p>\n

For instance, when I wrote Her Hidden Children: The Rise of Wicca and Paganism in America<\/a>, <\/em>one of the question that I wished to attempt to answer was, “What do we (Pagans) mean when we talk about nature religion.”<\/p>\n

You will get a different view with a different “we” if you read Bron Taylor’s\u00a0 Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

So if I were revising Her Hidden Children<\/em> (I have no plan to do so), I would have to take his ideas into account. The conversation would continue. Not that I am right and he is wrong, or vice versa, but I would have to sort out the differences and similarities, intellectual influences (e.g., he gives Henry Thoreau much more space than I do), and so on, because I think that Dark Green Religion <\/em>is a significant book, and it would be a glaring omission to ignore it now.<\/p>\n

These are just two books, against the flood of practitioner-oriented texts coming out from Llewellyn and other publishers.\u00a0 And neither I nor Bron (so far as I know) are teaching workshops on “How to be a better nature-religionist,” complete with breathing exercises, movement, and song. Other people could do that much better. Audiences want to hear a speaker with a schtick<\/em><\/a>.<\/p>\n

We do what we do because we like to think about these things, trying to find paths through the intellectual underbrush.\u00a0 (“Eliade <\/a>used to go up the hill this way. Is that path still useful?”)<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, you learn to argue whether there is such a thing as “religion<\/a>,” even while continuing to use the term.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

During my first semester of graduate school, I was told a cautionary tale. It was about a Christian pastor who went back for a PhD in religious studies. But one day he had had enough. He stood up from the seminar table and exclaimed, “That’s my Jesus you’re talking about!” The pastor’s reaction is the […]<\/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-2145","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-yB","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":676,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=676","url_meta":{"origin":2145,"position":0},"title":"Let's drop 'Neopagan'Back in the\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 11, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Let's drop 'Neopagan'Back in the 1970s, when Tim (now Oberon) Zell was editing Green Egg (America's leading Pagan zine at the time), \"Neopagan\" or \"Neo-Pagan\" was a cutting-edge term for a collection of religious movements from Wicca to Egyptian Reconstructionism.More recently, the British Pagan scholar Graham Harvey has suggested dropping\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":12836,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=12836","url_meta":{"origin":2145,"position":1},"title":"CFP: Pagan Studies Conference at Masaryk University","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 11, 2022","format":false,"excerpt":"Paganism and its Others 13-14 June 2022 Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts, Brno, Czechia The Department for the Study of Religions at Masaryk University invites your participation in a conference on the overall theme of \u201cPaganism and its Others\u201d to be held in Brno, Czechia, 13-14 June, 2022, with in-person\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":8434,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=8434","url_meta":{"origin":2145,"position":2},"title":"CFP: 2017 AAR Contemporary Pagan Studies Group","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 23, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"All the calls for the 2017 annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion are now online. The meeting itself will be held 18\u201321 November in Boston. The Pagan studies theme is \"Witch Hunts: Rhetorical, Historical and Contemporary.\" The term \u201cwitch hunt\u201d is used as a rhetorical strategy in contemporary\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13604,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=13604","url_meta":{"origin":2145,"position":3},"title":"Four Notable Books in Pagan Studies","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 12, 2024","format":false,"excerpt":"From Reading Religion, the book review website of the American Academy of Religion, a post by Ethan Doyle White, who writes, From Wiccan covens assembling in English drawing rooms to Rodnover midsummer gatherings in rural Russia, the modern Pagan religions represent a fascinating and diverse component of our contemporary religious\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Heathenry\"","block_context":{"text":"Heathenry","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=heathenry"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/04\/being-viking.jpeg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":4476,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=4476","url_meta":{"origin":2145,"position":4},"title":"Critical Theory, Mere Description, and Pagan Studies","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 16, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"Some thoughts after reading Markus Davidsen's review of the Handbook of Contemporary Paganism\u2014and, by extension, of the entire field of Pagan studies. Part of his critique does resonate with me. It raises an issue that I have thought about too. When I saw that the first authority cited was Russ\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Paganism\"","block_context":{"text":"Paganism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=paganism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":403,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=403","url_meta":{"origin":2145,"position":5},"title":"Job prospects for Pagan scholarsI\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 6, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Job prospects for Pagan scholarsI am speaking only of religious studies here, and I wish only to point out that a PhD (or terminal master's degree) with an emphasis on Pagan Studies is a poor bet in the academic job market at the present time.Every year, following the annual meeting,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2145","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=2145"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2145\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2160,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2145\/revisions\/2160"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2145"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2145"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2145"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}