{"id":6128,"date":"2013-12-02T13:37:38","date_gmt":"2013-12-02T20:37:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6128"},"modified":"2013-12-02T13:39:14","modified_gmt":"2013-12-02T20:39:14","slug":"orthography-and-the-modern-pagan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6128","title":{"rendered":"Orthography and the Modern Pagan"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/em>, which is the holy book, all 1,028 pages of it, for editors of academic books and journals\u2014plus many publishers of serious nonfiction.<\/p>\n

A petition has been sent to her by Oberon Zell of the Church of All Worlds, etc., as well as to the editors of the Associated Press Stylebook<\/em>,<\/a> the holy book of American journalists, about the capitalization of the word “Pagan.” Oberon has lined up forty-some writers and academics in support of the petition, which reads in part,<\/p>\n

The current journalistic convention of printing lower case for these terms seems to have originated with the Associated Press Stylebook<\/i>, first published in 1953. \u00a0However, a new era of religious pluralism has emerged over the past sixty years. The terms \u201cPagan\u201d and \u201cPaganism\u201d are now being capitalized in a variety of publications, texts, documents, and references, including religious diversity education resources such as On Common Ground: World Religions in America<\/i>, The Pluralism Project, Harvard University, and Inmate Religious Beliefs and Practices, Technical Reference Manual<\/i>, Federal Bureau of Prisons, U.S. Department of Justice.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You can read the full text here.<\/a><\/p>\n

So far, the University of Chicago Press has acknowledged receiving it and plans to forward it to its Reference Committee.<\/p>\n

This is a worthwhile cause, I think, and it is a battle that I have fought since the early 1990s (at least) when I was writing The Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics<\/em> <\/a>for the reference book publishers ABC-Clio. (A friend working there at the time commissioned it.) I won the battle on Pagan \u2014 even for ancient polytheists \u2014 but lost on BCE\/CE versus BC\/AD.<\/p>\n

As editor of The Pomegranate<\/a><\/em>, I have continued to insist on capital P’s except in direct quotations. This has put me in gentle conflict sometimes with British and other European contributors who favor “pagan” or at most use “Pagan” for self-conscious contemporary new religions and “pagan” for pre-Christian practices. I think that bouncing back and forth is confusing for the reader’s eye.<\/p>\n

So the movement to change the stylebooks is underway, although I expect the process to be a slow one.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 books and journals\u2014plus many publishers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":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":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[137,5,7,12],"class_list":["post-6128","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-academia","tag-paganism","tag-publishing","tag-writing"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-1AQ","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":6506,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6506","url_meta":{"origin":6128,"position":0},"title":"What Does the New AP Stylebook Say?","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 3, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"Last December I reported on an effort spearheaded by Oberon Zell to get Pagan (in the religious sense) capitalized in both the Associated Press Stylebook and the University of Chicago Press's Manual of Style. The first is used mainly by journalists (when they remember), the second by writers and editors\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":142,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=142","url_meta":{"origin":6128,"position":1},"title":"Next, the Associated Press Stylebook\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 13, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Next, the Associated Press Stylebook Wren at Witches' Voice posts an item about a student Pagan group meeting in a Kentucky high school, much to the surprise of administrators. But here is the interesting part: the reporter's last paragraph explaining what Paganism is. In fact, he repeats the Pagan \"party\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2473,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=2473","url_meta":{"origin":6128,"position":2},"title":"Among the Writer’s Style Books","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"March 21, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"The AP Stylebook, the holy book of the American journalist, is making some changes, such as now specifying \"email\" instead of \"e-mail.\" In my journalist days, I used to tell people that I had it memorized, but now I have moved on. Since entering academic journal and book editing, I\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"journalism\"","block_context":{"text":"journalism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=journalism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10568,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=10568","url_meta":{"origin":6128,"position":3},"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":8543,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=8543","url_meta":{"origin":6128,"position":4},"title":"I Lived in Magic: A Video Biography of Oberon Zell","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 3, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"Produced and directed by Danny Yourd (Animal Studio), this meditative interview with Oberon Zell (co-founder of the Church of All Worlds and the man who put \"Neo-Pagan\" into the American religious vocabulary in the 1970s) is a valuable piece of American Pagan history. (It can also be viewed at the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"\/\/ir-na.amazon-adsystem.com\/e\/ir?t=soutrocknatub-20&l=am2&o=1&a=0738714828","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1113,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=1113","url_meta":{"origin":6128,"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\/6128","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=6128"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6128\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6131,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6128\/revisions\/6131"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6128"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6128"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6128"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}