“Celtic Spirituality” as religious outbidding<\/b>.<\/p>\n
During the recent Spanish Peaks Celtic Music Festival<\/a>, St. Benedict Episcopal Church<\/a> in La Veta, Colorado, took out a small ad in the program for their Celtic Spirituality weekend.<\/p>\n Yes, before the contemporary Pagan movement was underway, various Anglicans were pushing “Celtic spirituality” as a way to make an end run around the Roman Catholics. Their claim that the Church of England<\/a> was rooted in the so-called Celtic church permitted claims such as this:<\/p>\n [The Church of England] preserved a tradition of [Celtic and Anglo-Saxon] scholarship which Rome had lost, together with a love of discipline which the Celt never had. The result was a vigorous, dignified, and self-reliant national Church.<\/em><\/p>\n Best of both worlds<\/a>, you see. It’s all about Celtic special-ness<\/a>.<\/p>\n Whereas the Vatican may claim the keys of St. Peter, Celtic spirituality lets one claim a link to the ancient, noble Druids (one of several interpretations of Druids, as will be neatly enumerated in Ronald Hutton’s upcoming book on them). See, for instance, this “Christ as Druid” prayer<\/a>, attributed to St. Columba<\/a>, but I wonder.<\/p>\n By claiming that Druids were peacefully converted and led their Pagan peoples into Christianity, the “Celtic church” casts itself as the irenic alternative to “convert-or-die” monotheisms.<\/p>\n Celtic Christians want to be like Druids, because one interpretation of Druids is as proto-monotheists. That interpretation came from writers who never met a Druid, as Stuart Piggott<\/a> explained forty years ago.<\/p>\n Some Episcopal clergy became a little too enthusiastic about Druidry and learned the hard way where the borders were.<\/a><\/p>\n I do not want to be too hard on the American Episcopalians. That church has been slowly self-destructing since the 1960s, when it became infected with a bad case of Vatican II<\/a>-envy.<\/p>\n Tags: Celts<\/a>, Celtic spirituality<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" “Celtic Spirituality” as religious outbidding. During the recent Spanish Peaks Celtic Music Festival, St. Benedict Episcopal Church in La Veta, Colorado, took out a small ad in the program for their Celtic Spirituality weekend. Yes, before the contemporary Pagan movement was underway, various Anglicans were pushing “Celtic spirituality” as a way to make an end […]<\/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":[],"tags":[10,38,24],"class_list":["post-743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tag-american-religion","tag-celts","tag-christianity"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-bZ","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":740,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=740","url_meta":{"origin":743,"position":0},"title":"Who’s a Celt now?-1","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 18, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"When I blogged the recent local Celtic music festival, I promised more on the tangled web of Celticity. This foggy, rainy, sleeting night seems a perfect time to begin.Take the assertion of Stephen Oppenheimer, an anthropologist who has published on the ancient populations of the British Isles:\"Celt\" is now a\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":741,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=741","url_meta":{"origin":743,"position":1},"title":"Who’s a Celt now? – 2","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 18, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"The word \"Celt\" first appears in English in 1706, but it referred then usually to the people of ancient Gaul (modern France), says the OED. There are some earlier uses of \"Celtic,\" again referring to the Gauls, from the late 17th century.\"Celts\" begame fashionable as Noble Savages after Scotland, in\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":752,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=752","url_meta":{"origin":743,"position":2},"title":"Who’s a Celt now? – 6","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 29, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Part 1, Part 2, Part 3,Part 4, Part 5Everything that we thought we knew about Celtic culture is probably wrong.But there is still language, right? If \"Celtic\" is not a genetic code, and it's not a spirituality, at least there are Celtic languages: Gaulish, Cornish, British-leading-to-Welsh, Irish and Scots Gaelic,\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":751,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=751","url_meta":{"origin":743,"position":3},"title":"Who’s a Celt now ? – 5","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 29, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4While they wanted to present Wicca as the indigenous religion of Britain, the founders of contemporary Witchcraft were not so much caught up in the \"Celtic\" mythos. Some, in fact, favored the Saxon. By the 1970s, however, \"cardiac Celts\" were everywhere. Writers such\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":750,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=750","url_meta":{"origin":743,"position":4},"title":"Who’s a Celt now? – 4","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"October 28, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Part 1, Part 2, Part 3There is no gene for \"Celtic,\" and, as we have seen (if you followed the links), \"Celtic culture\" is largely an invention of the late 18th and 19th centuries--created by the English and\/or of Welsh, Irish, and other tradition-inventors who went to London to make\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":755,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=755","url_meta":{"origin":743,"position":5},"title":"Who’s a Celt now? – 7","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 1, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"A quirky translation of witches' chantsPart 1, Part 2, Part 3,Part 4, Part 5, Part 6Stephen Oppenheimer, the anthropologist who combines DNA, archaeological, and linguistic evidence to argue against any \"glorious Celtic heritage\" in England, further argues that Celtic languages were not widespread there before the Roman invasion.His work reminded\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Celts\"","block_context":{"text":"Celts","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=celts"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743","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=743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/743\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}