{"id":439,"date":"2005-05-15T15:34:00","date_gmt":"2005-05-15T15:34:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=439"},"modified":"2005-05-15T15:34:00","modified_gmt":"2005-05-15T15:34:00","slug":"439","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=439","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

“Community” or fence-building?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A Roman reconstructionist Pagan decides that Pagan “community” is a hopeless notion<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The reason seems to be that too much group identity is built through denigrating other Pagan groups.<\/p>\n

What did I, the militant new convert to Reconstructionism, discover about the Greco-Roman spheres of reconstruction? I soon discovered it was not all that different from the neopagan morass which I had left.<\/em><\/p>\n

It’s a pity that people cannot realize that all<\/em> (neo) Pagan religions are just that, new, relatively, speaking, and that being new is just fine. Religion, from our point of view, is an expression of human creativity in response to All That Stuff In\/Out There.<\/p>\n

Or as the late psychologist of religion Daniel Noel<\/a> said in respect to “neo” shamansm, “Ain’t nobody here but us neos.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Community” or fence-building? A Roman reconstructionist Pagan decides that Pagan “community” is a hopeless notion. The reason seems to be that too much group identity is built through denigrating other Pagan groups. What did I, the militant new convert to Reconstructionism, discover about the Greco-Roman spheres of reconstruction? I soon discovered it was not all […]<\/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-439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s6xQTg-439","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":676,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=676","url_meta":{"origin":439,"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":1121,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1121","url_meta":{"origin":439,"position":1},"title":"Handbook of Contemporary Paganism in Print","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 14, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"My contributor copy of the new Handbook of Contemporary Paganism from Brill arrived. (You can tell from the price that it is intended primarily for the institutional market.) Here is the table of contents:\"The Modern Magical Revival,\" Nevill Drury\"The Influence of Aleister Crowley on Gerald Gardner and the Early Witchcraft\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":669,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=669","url_meta":{"origin":439,"position":2},"title":"Pagan Studies at AAR 2006","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 29, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"These papers are scheduled for presentation at the Pagan Studies session during next November's annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion: \"The Pagan Explosion,\" James Lewis \"The Fourfold Goddess and the Undying God: Anatomies of Minnesotan Bootstrap Witchcraft Traditions,\" Murph Pizza \"Children of Converts: Generational Retention in the Neo-Pagan\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":5825,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5825","url_meta":{"origin":439,"position":3},"title":"Defining Paganism (1.5)","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 13, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"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\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":10568,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10568","url_meta":{"origin":439,"position":4},"title":"Pagan with a Capital P","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 28, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"In editing the current issue of The Pomegranate, one of my \"favorite\" issues came up again: whether or not Pagan is capitalized. American scholars and Pagan authors tend to say yes. There has been a small campaign to convince the editors of the Associated Press Stylebook, widely used in the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"academia\"","block_context":{"text":"academia","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=academia"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/05\/Letter-P.gif?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":5,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=5","url_meta":{"origin":439,"position":5},"title":"Who and Where are the Pagans?","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 8, 2003","format":false,"excerpt":"Sociologist Helen A. Berger, author of A Community of Witches: Contemporary Neo-Paganism and Witchcraft in the United States, has a new book coming out in July, written together with Evan Leach and Leigh Shaffer. The title is Voices from the Pagan Census: A National Survey of Witches and Neo-Pagans in\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":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439","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=439"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}