Sunday, November 14, 2004

Frantic last-minute writing

Professors, accustomed to stories of their students working all night to complete a paper that is due the next day, themselves like to joke about finishing a conference paper on their laptop computers in the airplane en route to the conference.

In my case, it will probably be a motel somewhere in west Texas, between here and the American Academy of Religion annual meeting in San Antonio. (To get in the mood, I watched The Alamo, in which Billy Bob Thornton makes a fine, non-stereotypical David Crockett.)

I may be making final notes on Michael York's Pagan Theology for a panel devoted to the book at the Conference on Contemporary Pagan Studies on the 19th. In essence, this involves expanding my cover blurb ("audacious redrawing of traditional religious boundaries..." etc.) into a ten-minute presentation.

As far as Paganism is concerned, I have always been leery of people who wanted to rush into "doing theology." It seemed that what we needed were poets, ritualists, makers, and doers rather than theologians (or "thealogians," for whose who prefer the grammatical feminine). But York does present "Pagan theology" as an entity in itself, rather than merely as the mishmash from which "true religion" arose.

As Wendy Griffin said in her own cover blurb, he treats Pagan theology as its own entity rather what looking at what it is not when compared to Judeo-Christian tradition.

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