America the Religious

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One of the truths that doctoral work teaches you is that if you look closely at something, minute differences appear.  Those interested in historical subjects write up syntheses that cover over many of these minute differences until somewhat of a false impression might occur.  Consider Puritan New England.  The image is a familiar one to the American imagination.  Rigid, pious, fearful church-goers predominated.  Stern, often acerbic, ministers were voices of authority.  But in actual fact, maybe a third of those eligible to be so in Puritan New England were church members.  Many lived in remote locations and used folk traditions (what the church would condemn as “witchcraft”) to meet their spiritual needs.  This was DIY religion.  And yet, the overall picture is of an uptight, strict, Calvinistic world.  That’s only part of the story.

Controlling the narrative is a powerful thing.  For example, the religious right has often flouted the idea that America was very religious from the beginning.  The “falling away” from the church is only the result of modernism.  Before that, they claim, pretty much everybody was religious.  This is patently untrue.  But if the narrative is believed, it becomes powerful.  Historians face a dilemma here.  Not every single little detail can be written about anything.  If you read a history of, say, the United States, do you think everything is in those thousand pages?  No, not by a long shot.  Entire books written about a single individual don’t cover everything.  The temptation is to present an approximation that covers the general trends.  Those of us who study religious history have an extra hurdle—what people say they believe and what they actually believe might be quite different.

Demographic studies that show only a third of New Englanders were church members indicates that two-thirds of the story remained untold.  The city on a hill may have been an ideal, but most of the people lived in the valley.  People prefer a happy story, of course.  That’s natural enough.  When we look for facts sometimes the story can grow a little confused.  Shrink that history of the US down to a single state and it’s still unwieldy.  Even a single city.  Choices have to be made and approaches have to be decided.  What really happened?  You can bet your bottom dollar that it was a lot more complex than any history book indicates.  People prefer mythological national narratives to naturalistic ones.  When we buy into simple materialism we often mistake our mythic past for a factual one.

Ghostly Book

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Recently I’ve been thinking about internet searching—how some information is difficult to find.  This book provides an example.  I saw what we in the biz call a “new book announcement” (NBA for bookish sorts).  Since I’ve been reading about the Hudson Valley the subtitle of Ghosts in Residence (Stories from Haunted Hudson Valley) caught my eye.  I assumed it was a new book and eagerly awaited its release.  When it arrived I discovered that it was a “new in paperback” (NiP) edition of a book published in 1986.  This edition, published this year, didn’t update things, including author information.  Given that H. A. von Behr was born in 1902, I doubt he’s still alive, but the book simply borrows the LCCP (Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication) data from 1986, showing the author’s dates as 1902–  .  Perhaps unintentionally appropriate for a book about ghosts.

This is an odd book, all around.  Although published in 1986, much of it deals with even earlier times—the author’s recollections of the forties—as well as some more recent events.  Hans von Behr cuts the image of a country gentleman while his neighbors in the Valley go on fox hunts and he has what seem like daily cocktail parties on the lawn.  He dashes off an article about his favorite dog and gets a healthy check from Outdoor Life.  This is a different world.  But then there are the ghosts.  But more than that, also strange happenings.  The ghost tales are intriguing, and some of the other strange events head-scratching.  The whole has a quasi-autobiographical aspect to it, but while not revealing too much.  A couple chapters deal with hauntings in Germany.

My web searching for H. A. von Behr revealed very little.  He was a retired scientist and photographer (he had some high profile clients) and the book contains many of his photographs of the locations discussed.  This short book explains how he came to purchase a haunted farmhouse upstate for a second home (again, a different world), how he discovered it was haunted, and how many of his friends and acquaintances revealed, over time, that their houses also had ghosts.  The book is charming in its own way, and a quick read.  Still, it’s a little disorienting when you can’t find more information about someone online.  The options are to do library research (my favorite kind) but am I really that curious about this author?  I wanted to read about the ghosts, and that I did.  And many other incidental things besides.

Seminary Daze

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It’s surprisingly easy to throw away an expensive career that once held much promise.  It really involves just a two steps: spend thousands of dollars earning a Ph.D. in religious studies, and take a job in a seminary.  It’s disheartening to watch colleagues going through this as seminaries contract, then close.  I know how it feels personally.  You’re suddenly aware that your years and years of training have made you practically unemployable.  If you do find a job it won’t pay as well.  Chances are you won’t enjoy it either.  Having taught in a seminary will mark you in academia as one of those “uncritical believers,” and, well, nobody wants to touch one of those.  While I would’ve taken a regular seminary job after my doctorate, my wife remembers me lying awake at night asking “Am I cutting off my career if I take a job at Nashotah House?”  The answer: yes.

I’ve been watching colleagues have their worlds torn apart as seminaries try to figure out how to stay open when institutional churches are dying.  Megachurches don’t require a seminary degree to run—natural grifters do it quite well with no advanced education, thank you.  But mainstream churches have been losing members, and therefore financial support, for years now.  And seminaries supply a commodity no longer in demand.  This may have been a trend when I started out back in the eighties.  If so, nobody told me about it.  I walked into this career naive and came out jaded and cynical.  My motives were to help other people.  It’s getting harder and harder to find jobs where you do that any more.  At least while being able to keep body and soul together.

Thing is, it takes years to earn the degrees you need to teach in a seminary. You have to think ahead.  When I started out, trends suggested a huge glut of jobs in the teaching market.  That never panned out, of course, as human predictions seldom do, and the decline in jobs has been pretty steady over the past thirty years.  Back in the eighties seminaries were doing okay.  Growing, even.  I do hope it didn’t have anything to do with me, but I hit this surprisingly fragile market at just the wrong time.  After having been overboard without a life preserver myself, it pains me to watch colleagues facing the same fate themselves.  Religion hasn’t disappeared—it’s simply taken on new forms.  Those forms don’t require seminary. Those of us who followed the rules on how to teach religious studies, however, somehow find ourselves in disposable careers.

Forgetting Witch

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Being forgotten.  Isn’t that one of our greatest fears?  We want to be remembered, our desperate “Kilroy was here”s scribbled on the impermanent earth.  This is the fear that’s at play in The Wretched.  This fairly low budget horror film came to hold the record of being a box-office top earner for six consecutive weeks in 2020.  This was a technicality, of course.  The pandemic was in full swing and other major motion pictures were put on hold.  The Wretched played on, earning little, but more than other films.  It’s not a great movie, but it’s not a bad one either.  It all has to do with what might best be called a “witch.”  In reality, the monster is based only in part on witch traditions, but the twist is this monster makes you forget the people she takes as her victims.

The story hinging on an impending divorce and a somewhat rudderless young man being sent to live with his father in Michigan while his parents sort things out.  Ben, the young man, notices the neighbor’s young Goth wife, but something’s strange about her.  While in the woods, she and her son encountered the monster—revealed as a witch by the occult symbol carved into a tree near her den.  She steals the family baby (you’ll probably hear echoes of The Witch here, and you wouldn’t be wrong) and the family forgets there was a baby.  She then takes over the body of the mother.  Ben spies on them, Rear Window-style, when he’s not at work.  Soon the older son of the couple is missing, and the father claims they have no children.

Ben, while starting a romance with Mallory, a girl from work, pieces together what’s going on, but nobody believes him.  The problem is the missing persons are all forgotten.  To me, anyway, that was the scary part.  Ironically, while not literally so, the movie itself has been forgotten.  We all remember those days of panic in the spring of three years ago.  Long days when we didn’t leave our homes because some killer virus was rapidly spreading and the leader of the country simply didn’t care.  Those who released movies (or published books) in 2020 know that their work was quickly forgotten.  People had other things on their minds then.  I still don’t quite get why it’s called The Wretched, unless it’s perhaps those who are forgotten.  If so, the movie may become a parable of the many creative works that emerged during a time when our collective mind was clearly elsewhere.

Speaking of The Wicker Man

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The TheoFantastique website is older than my blog and, I suspect, has more followers.  I was immediately struck when I first found it in my early days of blogging.  Seeing that the fantastic—genres that include sci-fi, horror, and some adventure material—often comments on and often uses religion as its milieu, the site features many posts about topics I find compelling.  Over the years I’ve had the opportunity to get to know John Morehead, the creator and builder of the site and he has kindly agreed to interview me about each of my books that deal with these topics.  The links to those interviews (which can all be found on YouTube) are on the “Social Media & Interviews” page of this blog.  Just yesterday John recorded and posted an interview on The Wicker Man.

There is a small community of us that explore these connections between religion and pop culture.  My interests, as careful readers will know, is really with monsters but I’m still learning how to write about such things and, more importantly, to do so with limited resources.  That often means analyzing films because they are accessible whereas research trips to libraries and locations that monsters dwell isn’t really conducive to a 9-2-5 job with no sabbaticals or even summer or holiday breaks (capitalism is relentless).  I can take in a movie or two over a weekend without leaving home and I can use my writing time to explore them.  Thus Holy Horror, Nightmares with the Bible, and The Wicker Man were born.  And interviews about them can all be found on TheoFantastique as well.  There’s also much, much more there.

By the way, John is also quite a capable author and editor.  He’s got wonderful books to his credit as well.  Some of them appear on this website and the others I haven’t got around to reading yet.  (My “to read” list is about as long as the Burj Khalifa is high.)  I often think that being a full-time reader should be a job.  It is, I guess, if your own books sell well enough.  Otherwise you need to work around the long days at the office to make ends meet.  But I digress.  In this era of information via recorded media, online interviews are key to getting word out about your book.  Coincidentally, quite unexpectedly a single hardback copy of The Wicker Man arrived just yesterday as well.  That always helps when it comes to bookends.  But it may help to watch the interview before just diving in.

Curious Valley

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Another of my guilty pleasure reading categories is local history, written by locals.  As a genre these books may not always go back to primary sources, and they may get a fact or two wrong, but still they’re endlessly fascinating and I always learn something (which is the point of reading, after all).  I enjoyed Allison Guertin Marchese’s rambles along the Hudson Valley.  I’d encountered some of these tidbits before, but most of them were new to me and show just how interesting a place this particular river valley is.  Living in a strange world is so much more beguiling than a prosaic, predictable place.  Still, you’ve got to accept that anything can happen.  Unlike many such books, Hudson Valley Curiosities does not focus on paranormal, although ghosts and UFOs turn up a time or two.

Since this region is about 145 miles from end to end, the book divides it into lower, middle, and upper regions and gives about equal time to each.  The curiosities range from mastodons to prohibition busters, from shipwrecks to Shakers.  I’d never made the connection with the Shakers and the Hudson Valley before.  While the Shaking Quakers had their origins in England, they eventually migrated to the New World, settling in the northern end of the Hudson Valley.  The book points out that they were noted inventors, living by their own means as they did, they came up with their own solutions to problems.  Another aspect of these curios is the number of them that involved women who took on the cause of women’s rights.  The first female candidate for President of the United States, Victoria Woodhull, is discussed, as is Deborah Sampson, the woman who dressed as a man to fight in the Revolutionary War.

Marchese provides a helpful bibliography as well.  As someone trained in historical method, I like to go back to the sources.  Of course, that means assessing both publisher and author, and taking into account what passed for facts at the time.  History is an endlessly fascinating enterprise.  Many historians, however, leave out the controversial or questionable materials that a local historian is inclined to leave in.  That’s what makes books like this such a guilty pleasure.  Who doesn’t like to look behind the curtain now and again and see what’s happening out of the public eye?  And it’s helpful to keep in mind that by far the most of history takes place far from the headlines.  That’s where real life happens, no matter how strange.  And it’s a guilty pleasure to read about it from a local who finds, gathers, and preserves the stories.

Striving for

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Get Out! was Allison Williams’ first feature film starring role.  Playing the unsuspected villain, she was incredibly believable.  Then I saw M3GAN where her role was again not exactly that of protagonist.  Curious, I decided to watch The Perfection, the horror film between the two in which she also stars.  As always, she starts out looking innocent enough, but this film has so many twists that you might be left feeling a bit dizzy when it’s over.  Williams plays Charlotte, a gifted cellist at the prestigious Bachoff Academy.  Forced to leave by her mother’s stroke, Charlotte became a full-time caregiver, leaving her promising career behind.  She’s superseded by Lizzie, whom she meets in Shanghai as the two are judging a scholarship contest for a new Bachoff student competition.  Lizzie and Charlotte hit it off and travel across China together.  Lizzie, however, falls ill and has to have her hand amputated.

A flashback reveals Charlotte tricked Lizzie into that situation so that the Bachoff star cellist would no longer be useful to the academy.  Another flashback shows why: Anton Bachoff has devised a horrid punishment for making mistakes while playing.  While this is disturbing enough, it takes place in “the chapel”—a room designed with perfect acoustics—and is done to please “God.”  This set-up has been operating for years and Charlotte was rescuing Lizzie from it, albeit in a rather extreme way.  The two cellists team up to bring Anton down.  There are quite a few holes in the plot and rape revenge films are one of the kinds I tend to avoid.  Still, the integration of religion with the horror is intriguing here.  One of the opening establishing shots is a close-up of a crucifix.  Sacrifice is indeed a theme of the film.

Critical opinion was mixed, but mostly positive.  The plot twists get you thinking that Williams is again playing the unexpected villain, and in a way she is.  Still, the real villain is a man who manipulates religious rhetoric (God demands perfection) in order to supply him with access to talented young women.  When they achieve international stardom, they’re not inclined to join #MeToo and lose everything because Anton is not only wealthy, but highly respected in classical music circles.  This is an odd sort of horror thriller that works on some levels but that leaves you feeling violated on another.  It doesn’t play out the religion element in any detail, which would’ve been helpful.  At least it would to a certain kind of viewer, who’s trying to figure out how this all fits together.

Ending Worlds

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It takes a kind of talent to write a long novel where I don’t have any feelings for any of the characters.  I’ve studied writing enough to know that “Mary Sues”—characters who have no flaws—are to be avoided.  Yet, writing so that no characters over a span of about 300 years seem to be able to garner at least pity (and my therapist tells me I a very sympathetic person) is a feat.  All of which is to say I didn’t much enjoy the award-winning World’s End by T. C. Boyle.  This novel is set in the Hudson Valley, which is one of my current obsessions, and I thought the sense of place would draw me in.  Stories where everyone drinks all the time, and mostly they get high after that, and then wonder why tragic things happen when they drive, really aren’t for me.  I accept and admit that the onus is on me. (I freely confess to preferring speculative fiction.)

Successfully writing a novel that ties several families together over the generations is, however, an achievement of literary architecture.  It’s just that not all novels work for everyone.  There is a sense of maybe a little cosmic justice at the end, but it feels at times almost as if the side that’s being cheered on is the wealthy one.  Maybe it’s reflecting the way life works.  Or maybe I’m not a subtle enough of a reader to understand.  For whatever reason, it really didn’t speak to me.  It could also be that I need to reflect on it more.  Growing up poor with an alcoholic father and seeing firsthand the entrenched ways of the wealthy and how they effectively keep other people down, such tales tend to set me off.  None of this is to gainsay the artistry since it clearly condemns the land theft from American Indians and unrepentant wealth.  

It’s this last point from which the novel really takes its strength—ownership of the land.  As mortal creatures we have a strange idea that we can own something that will outlast us.  In the novel’s resolution that ownership shifts, unbeknownst to the wealthy, back to the original owners through an illegitimate child.  There may be some social commentary intended here and this makes the story less of a justification of white ownership.  I guess many of us are very sensitive to fascist characters since the Trump administration.  Perhaps had I read the novel in the late eighties, when it was first published, this would’ve seemed less troubling because we would’ve thought then that such a thing could never happen.  But three centuries is a long time and we simply can’t tell, although World’s End suggests justice might be served in the long term.

Good Book Selling

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A few weeks back, probably several now actually, the New York Times ran a story about the Bible.  In this age of declining interest in the Good Book such things catch my attention.  Of course, the reason that the story ran was because of the money involved.  Let me explain.  Or at least give the headline: “Oldest Nearly Complete Hebrew Bible Sells for $38.1 Million.”  Money talks, even when it comes to Scripture.  The story was about the auction of the Codex Sassoon, which went to a museum.  Most regular Bible readers aren’t aware of the textual criticism behind their favorite translations—yes, even the good ol’ King James.  You see, no original biblical manuscripts survive.  Not by a long shot.  Every biblical manuscript in the world is a copy of a copy of a copy, etc.  And these copies differ from one another.  Often quite a bit.

Textual criticism is the job of comparing manuscripts and using scientific—yes, scientific—principles to determine which one better reflects what was likely original.  Since we don’t actually have the original we can’t say.  Those who hold views of extreme reverence for one translation or another have to resort to divine guidance of the textual critics to make the case.  For example, they might argue that God inspired the translators of the King James to follow one manuscript rather than another.  The King James was based on manuscripts known at the time (only about six of them) and far older manuscripts—inherently more likely to reflect earlier views and potentially closer to the original—have been discovered since then.  And are still discovered.  That was one of the reasons behind all the fuss over the Dead Sea Scrolls.  They represent some of the earliest biblical manuscripts ever found.

The Bible is an identity-generating book.  In this secular age, the failure of “the educated” to realize this simple fact often leads to underestimation of the importance of religion.  It motivates the largest majority of people in the world.  We should pay attention to it.  It doesn’t make headlines too often, though.  Instead, politicians who pretend they respect the Bible but live lives about as far from its precepts as possible, gather the limelight.  When money gets involved the Bible becomes interesting again.  We think about that thirty-eight-million.  What we might do with that kind of money.  How we might be able to pay somebody to paint that fence that desperately needs it, or better, to help those in desperate need.  The many victims of capitalism.  Where their heart is, there their treasure will be also.

Creepy AI Doll

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We’ve all seen the killing doll horror movie before, of course.  Who hasn’t?  What makes M3GAN different is the whole artificial intelligence angle.  Okay, so you understand it’s about a killing doll, but unlike Chucky or Annabelle, M3GAN has a titanium frame and a super-advanced, wifi-connected brain.  Like generative AI, she’s able to learn on her own and even able to use her own reasoning to get around her basic programming.  Now, you’re likely smarter than me and I didn’t catch what the critics call the “campiness” to the film.  Yes, there are places that made me snicker a little, but although the killing doll premise made the results somewhat predictable, I watched it seriously.  Some websites list it as horror comedy, while others prefer sci-fi thriller.  Nevertheless, it isn’t really that funny.  And there’s a cautionary element to it.

Funki, a Seattle-based toy company, is always trying to stay ahead of the competition.  Animatronic toys are the rage, and Gemma (brilliant choice to have a female mad scientist here) is a visionary programmer.  She wasn’t expecting, however, to become her niece’s guardian after Gemma’s sister was killed in an accident.  The M3GAN prototype was already underway, but Gemma kicks it into high gear to help make up for her own lack of parenting skills.  M3GAN becomes her niece’s companion—soulmate, even—and since the two are bonded with biometrics, her protector.  Bullies, lend me your ear; you don’t want to mess with a girl who has an android as a bestie.  And nosey neighbors, fix that hole in your fence.  Or at least curb your dog.

Instead of I, Robot this is more like You, Robot.  There is a wisdom to the othering that goes on here because none of us know in what kind of reasoning generative IA might engage.  In real life computers have been discovered communicating with one another in a language that their programmers couldn’t read.  We’re all biological, however, and thinking, as we know it, involves many biological factors.  Logic is part of it, but it’s not the whole story.  So techies who idolize Spock and his lack of emotion feel that they can emulate thinking by making it a set of algorithms.  My algorithms lead me to watch horror films out of a combination of curiosity and a need for therapy.  Where does a computer go for therapy?  The internet?  Well, you might find some good advice there, but don’t be surprised if it comes at you with a paper-cutter sword in the end.  You’ve been warned.

Devil Talk

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Around here, an after-school Satanic Temple club, prompted by an after-school evangelical club, led to a lawsuit where our tax dollars are being wasted.  Many local people wondered what was going on and I knew I had a book on my shelf that would help to answer that but I had to find the time to read it.  Joseph P. Laycock has been writing fascinating books for a few years now.  I picked up his Speak of the Devil: How the Satanic Temple Is Changing the Way We Talk about Religion just after it was published, but it always takes some time for me to get to books that I know I’ll have to spend time with.  I was right about spending time—there’s a lot packed in here that requires some thought.  I was vaguely aware of what the Satanic Temple is but had difficulty distinguishing it from the Church of Satan.  (I have a book on the latter, but it’s quite big and I haven’t found the time for it yet either.)  Laycock spells it out clearly.

The book begins by discussing how the Satanic Temple entered public consciousness in 2013.  Yes, it’s only been about a decade.  If you think it’s more than that, you may be confusing it with Anton LaVey’s Church of Satan.  They are different organizations.  One thing they have in common is that neither promotes belief in a literal Satan.  Both also rely on shock tactics to get their point across.  The Satanic Temple is a socially conscious organization that reacts to provocations of conservative Christian groups to try to establish their brand of Christianity as the officially sanctioned state religion.  And the evangelical groups have been making in-roads for years.  Playing the innocence card, “We’re just mainstream America saying what everyone’s thinking,” they put religious monuments in public spaces, start public meetings with Christian prayers, and receive state funding for their programs.  Often unchallenged.

Laycock’s not discussing evangelicals, but rather how the Satanic Temple arose in response to efforts to establish one form of Christianity as state sponsored.  There’s a ton of information in this book.  Among the many takeaways for me was the discussion of how good and evil are determined.  This is obviously directly relevant when Satan is involved, especially since the Devil is a post-biblical development.  The Satanic Temple, which doesn’t teach that there’s a literal Devil, attempts to counter the standard narrative by doing good deeds in the name of humanism.  You might be able to guess the conservative Christian response to that.  If you can’t, this book will help to spell it out for you.

Perhaps Unexpected

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Of course I’d heard about it, but I hadn’t envisioned myself seeing it.  My family, however, wanted to get in on the Barbie conversation and, I justified to myself, at least we’d be in air conditioning for a couple of hours.  Besides, I now get “senior” rates at matinees!  I knew very little of what to expect, and I was pleasantly surprised by what I found.  In fact, I can’t remember the last time I saw a movie that was so full of social commentary.  And I actually learned quite a bit.  If you’re one of the maybe a dozen people who hasn’t seen it, the plot is more complex than you might think.  And the writing is smart.  And it’s funny.  I was hooked from the opening parody of 2001: A Space Odyssey.  The scene based on The Matrix made me realize that I was watching something unusual and important.

I’ll try to be careful with spoilers here, but basically, stereotypical Barbie experiences an existential crisis that leads her to the real world to find out what’s going on.  Ken tags along, uninvited, and Barbie is distressed to find that the real world hasn’t been equalized between the genders the way that she was intended to help it become.  While in the real world Ken gets a taste of patriarchy and decides to take it back to Barbie Land.  When Barbie returns she finds her once perfect world upside down.  But that’s not quite right.  She comes to realize that the world run by women wasn’t exactly perfect because men and women need to cooperate and share some responsibility.

There’s a lot more to it than that, of course.  How we’ve gone for centuries maintaining male dominance (might makes right philosophy), even while claiming to be “enlightened” is a mystery. Gender inequality is one of the biggest social concerns we experience.  Almost nowhere in the world are societies truly equal and Barbie offers a funny, yet poignant way of thinking about that.  I wouldn’t bother writing about it if the message wasn’t important.  The movie isn’t a feminist screed.  Nor is it simplistic drivel.  It’s a surprisingly sophisticated consideration of a society out of balance.  I’ve been in favor of equal treatment of women for as long as I’ve been conscious of the difference.  Raised by a capable single mother, I noticed in my formative years that she was doing what two-parent families did, with less than half the resources.  While Barbie won’t solve all our social ills, it is getting the conversation going.  From my point of view, it’s about time.

Mystical

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I would never have experienced Tibetan singing bowls were it not for a family member’s cancer diagnosis.  Something you quickly learn is that many resources are available to help you cope.  One of those local to this area was/is Tibetan singing bowls.  I had no idea what to expect, but as a lifelong explorer of religion, I had gathered that the session would likely involve ways of thinking more common in East Asian cultures.  I was taken, however, on a spiritual journey.  In a darkened room with twenty-to-thirty cancer survivors, on our backs on the floor, we experienced sound.  Now, my musical training and ability are quite limited.  I could not identify most of the instruments (I kept my eyes closed), apart from the singing bowls which I had heard in other, western religious contexts as well.  I’ve had mystical experiences before, but I don’t know you well enough to tell you all about them.

Photo by Magic Bowls on Unsplash

The first thing I noticed this time was the color blotches in my closed eyes.  Everyone sees those kinds of things, but as the sounds increased the colors began to range outside their usual purple into whites and yellows.  It was almost like a segment from Fantasia.  The colors then began to take shape, some forming into flowers.  I knew my imagining mind had taken hold when images began to appear.  Although it was my usual bedtime by this point, I was fully cognizant of being awake.  There was no real storyline, but I was conscious of losing my sense of individuality and becoming part of the greater whole, which is what being a being on a small planet is all about.  As the sound meditation wound down, I realized that it had been many years since I’d put myself into such an environment.  It took some time to reorient myself.  When we arrived at home I was, paradoxically, too relaxed to fall asleep.

One of my college professors warned me against mysticism.  Mystical experiences are rare, in my life anyway, but unforgettable.  If you live long enough and pay the right kind of attention, however, you can find them.  They leave you with a profound sense of hope.  I’m not about to go off and join a Buddhist monastery, but Thomas Merton reminds us that Buddhism and Christianity are perfectly compatible.  This particular college professor was afraid, I surmise, that spiritual experience might outstrip dogged devotion to a single book.  Mysticism can take you to places that convince you what passes for reality is not all that’s real.  Being with lovely people who’ve had to face cancer is a spiritual experience in its own right.  Why shut out the light inside?

Generation Tech

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You can’t be lazy in a technocracy.  I find myself repeating this mantra to myself when dealing with many people who use technology only when strictly necessary.  They don’t realize the war has already been lost.  If you want to thrive in this new world order, you need to keep up at least a modicum with technology.  I deal with a lot of people for whom biblical studies means handling only pens and paper.  J. C. L. Gibson, one of my doctoral advisors, wrote all his books longhand and had his secretary type them.  That’s simply no longer possible.  For authors, if you’re not willing to put notice of your books on Facebook, Twitter (or, as it seems to be going, Threads) people aren’t going to notice.  Publishers don’t send print catalogues any more.  My physical mailbox has been quite a bit less used of late.

There’s an irony to the fact that the generation that grew up on Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are a-Changin’” are now refusing to accept our robo-overlords.  AI is here to stay and shy of a total collapse of the electrical grid, we’re not going back to where we were in the sixties.  The times have a-changed.  And you know what Bob says to do if you can’t lend an appendage.  Now, if you read my blog regularly, you know that I don’t go into this future with a sincere smile.  But at least I try to keep up with what I need to to survive.  I have to stop and remind myself how to write a check.  Or fold a roadmap.  I suspect that many of those who object to doing academic business electronically also drive by GPS.  It beats getting lost.

How does this connect to the internet?

No, I’m not the first in line.  I still wouldn’t be using a headset for Zoom/Teams meetings if my wife hadn’t given me an old one of hers.  This despite the fact I complain that I can’t hear others who insist they can speak clearly without and whose voices are muffled by the echoes in their work-at-home room.  Nevertheless, if you want to be a professional of any stripe, you need to reconcile yourself with technology and its endless changes.  You wake up one morning and Twitter is now X and you find yourself xing rather than tweeting.  I need to get more followers on Threads, but you can’t do that on your laptop—I guess times are still a-changin’.

Pagan Fear

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We still fear pagans.  Religion and horror are often tied up together, but when it comes to monsters we trust Catholics and fear pagans.  Of course, when Startefacts recommended The Ritual it was in the context of five pagan horror movies you should see.  I’d seen three of the others, so The Ritual seemed the next logical step.  Four friends are hiking through Sweden to honor the wishes of a fifth friend killed during a robbery.  When one of the them injures his knee, they decide to take a shortcut through the forest where a combination of the Blair Witch Project and Midsommar and Antlers takes place.  After finding a freshly gutted elk in a tree, they take shelter in an abandoned cabin surrounded by runic signs on the trees.  Soon they’re being hunted by a huge creature they can’t see clearly.

The final two are captured by a pagan group that worships one of the Jötnar—the monster that’s been hunting them.  The final boy escapes by getting out of the forest, where the Jötunn can’t go.  The choice of a Germanic monster is a bit different, and the creature design is fascinating.  Jötnar apparently straddle the line between gods and monsters, being a kind of frost giant.  The pagan group sees it as a deity that keeps them safe in return for sacrifices.  Given the number of bodies in the trees, other hikers had decided the shortcut was worth taking in the past.  But still, the pagans are cast as the bad guys.  This is in spite of the fact that the friend whose death started the whole thing was killed in England.

The religious convictions of the English robbers aren’t made clear, but they were raised in a Christian context and are every bit as brutal as the pagans.  In fact, the pagans, although they sacrifice strangers, do try to talk kindly to them (at least if they have the mark of the Jötunn on them).  Not just the pagans are savages.  At least they have a moral reason for what they’re doing, in their own minds.  The criminals are in it only for themselves.  We still fear those of other religions, although they’ve come to their beliefs in a way similar to how we’ve come to ours.  Whether born into it or converted, believers generally come to their conclusions honestly.  In the world of the film, this Jötunn is real.  And, until the end, it protects those who worship it.  So yes, this is a pagan horror film, but it makes the viewer wonder whence the horror really comes.