Two years ago at the American Academy of Religion, we had a Pagan Studies session with “idolatry” in the title. Sessions are described by posters on easels outside the meeting rooms, and I heard a few snickers from people passing in the corridor.<\/p>\n
Inside the room, people were talking about statues, etc., as windows on the divine. One paper compared the ritual treatment, dressing, and so on of a Madonna in a Spanish village with a goddess image in Glastonbury.<\/p>\n
At the\u00a0 Get Religion<\/em> blog, which examines the journalistic treatment of religion, there was some discomfort with the way a reporter in India wrote of an “idol” of Jesus that had been vandalized.<\/a> To me it seemed that the word was used merely in a technical sense, but to the blogger it seemed defamatory: “For a Western audience calling a statue of Jesus an idol is thoughtless or a deliberately provocative statement \u2014 both have meanings bellow the surface.”<\/p>\n But I doubt if the original article was meant to provoke, merely to describe.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, here is a review of a new novel<\/a> with this premise: “This is a sprawaling and subversively funny satire centered around two down-on-their-luck entrepreneurs who stumble upon the idea of reviving for-profit idolatry. Selling statues of household gods to the masses, and building a neo-pagan religion around it.”<\/p>\n I think that this has already been done, guys. Have you looked at the Sacred Source catalog<\/a> lately? “Fair-trade statuary featuring ancient deities” \u2014 looks like they are avoiding the I-word too.<\/p>\n (I have blogged on related topics before. See “The Street of the Idol-Makers<\/a>” and “Casual Labor at the New Age Trade Show.<\/a>“)<\/p>\n Now there is a somewhat more sophisticated, more nuanced way in which the monothesists use “idolatry.” It is when they accuse people of putting lesser goals ahead of the Ultimate Goal, as they see it.<\/p>\n Here is Catholic blogger<\/a> Elizabeth Scalia writing at First Things<\/em><\/a>:<\/p>\n But I wonder if it is not the first and greatest sin named by Yahweh and given to Moses, that is most at fault: the sin of idolatry. We have loved ourselves so well; we have denied ourselves nothing and placed too much of what we love between ourselves and God; we have cherished mere things or other people; over-identified with ideas or ideologies and made an afterthought of God, who will not be mocked.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n You can find essentially the same rhetoric from Muslims, merely substituting “Allah” for where Scalia, a few paragraphs down, writes “the Triune God.”<\/p>\n Here “idolatry” is not about whether material things can embody a divine presence, but it has become a metaphor for misplaced philosophical or spiritual priorities. I have less quarrel with that. But I still mistrust the implied devaluation of “the material”\u2014not in the sense of a $4,000 wristwatch, but in the sense of the Earth around us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Two years ago at the American Academy of Religion, we had a Pagan Studies session with “idolatry” in the title. Sessions are described by posters on easels outside the meeting rooms, and I heard a few snickers from people passing in the corridor. Inside the room, people were talking about statues, etc., as windows on […]<\/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":[24,164],"class_list":["post-3475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-christianity","tag-idolatry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-U3","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":70,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=70","url_meta":{"origin":3475,"position":0},"title":"Idol Thoughts","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 27, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"After three days of hearing papers and networking at AAR-SBL, our brains were full, so half a dozen friends and I headed for the traveling Etruscan exhibit at Atlanta's Fernbank Museum. It was wonderful to get away from the convention-hotel district. The exhibit on ancient Etruscan life was organized by\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":2050,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2050","url_meta":{"origin":3475,"position":1},"title":"Idolatry as a Category in Pagan Studies","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 29, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"I have spent all afternoon squeezing out a thousand words on the topic of idolatry, a sort of cross between an encyclopedia entry and a summary of four essays appearing in the upcoming issue of The Pomegranate (which is almost finished, thanks be!). In a paper given during one of\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"scholarship\"","block_context":{"text":"scholarship","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=scholarship"},"img":{"alt_text":"Michael York","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/MichaelYorkMug21-102x150.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6519,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6519","url_meta":{"origin":3475,"position":2},"title":"Around the Blogosphere: A Pagan Cat, Multiple Souls, and Idolatry","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 9, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00b6 \"I don't want to be rude, but what religion are you?\" A Pagan pet's name produces confusion at the veterinary clinic. \u00b6\u00a0\u00a0 \"The Three\/Four Souls and Their Afterlives.\" Heather at Eaarth Animist\u00a0looks at different traditional accounts to learn what might explain her own experiences: \"It has baffled many Western\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"animals\"","block_context":{"text":"animals","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=animals"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1137,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1137","url_meta":{"origin":3475,"position":3},"title":"Polytheism and the Empowered Individual","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"April 2, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"An interesting article from a Hindu writer on polytheism, monotheism, and contemporary politics in India: \"The March to Monotheism.\"This paragraph caught my eye:If the upside of monotheism is universalism and egalitarianism, the downside is that it admits of no rival. There can be no middle ground, no compromise. Reality is\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"polytheism\"","block_context":{"text":"polytheism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=polytheism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":7450,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=7450","url_meta":{"origin":3475,"position":4},"title":"Khalid al-Asaad and the War on Pagan Idolatry","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"August 20, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"Wouter Hanegraaff, professsor of Western esotericism at the University of Amsterdam, has written a moving blog post on larger implications of the death of Khalid al-Asaad, the Syrian archaeologist recently beheaded by the Muslim fighters of the so-called Islamic State. (He was a Muslim too, of course.) We are told\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"archaeology\"","block_context":{"text":"archaeology","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=archaeology"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2405,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2405","url_meta":{"origin":3475,"position":5},"title":"The Pomegranate 12:1","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 26, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"I have let weeks go by without mentioning the latest issue of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies! Here is the table of contents. All book reviews and article abstracts are free. Articles \"Franz S\u00e4ttler (Dr. Musallam) and the Twentieth-Century Cult of Adonism\" Hans Thomas Hakl \"Walk Like\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"scholarship\"","block_context":{"text":"scholarship","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=scholarship"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3475","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=3475"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3475\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3555,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3475\/revisions\/3555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}