Dreaming the Future Closer

This is sort of a housekeeping tab, a way for me to keep track of things I want to get done here.  As I actually get to them, I’ll edit this page to indicate their completion and link to them.

1) Blog entry on the hermeneutics of demonization, elaborating on my brief mention here.   I want to talk about the spiritual dimensions but also focus on the way in which it is expressed in the social imaginary.  I want to avoid the romantic (demons are just angels when you understand them) and the pessimistic take (demons are evil) in order to find a middle ground.  Maintain the sense of danger without yielding to paranoia.

2) Update the reading list: Cassirer’s Language and Myth.

3) Update the reading list: Plotinus’s The Enneads.

4) Revisiting Dumezil’s tripartite structure and thinking through some of the dangers of conflating those roles first with each other and, secondly, with politics (i.e. why kingship, priesthood, and soldierliness are still important dimensions of spiritual experience even when not part of a state government; perhaps even beign more truly what they are when divorced from that government)

5) Discussing the spiritual significance of blood ties, but deepening the discussion beyond lineage.

DONE:

1) Book review for Women’s Religious Activity in the Roman Republic by Celia Schultz is HERE.  This dovetails beautifully with the Herskovitzes commentary on women’s cults in Dahomey and explores what resources are available in the classical context to circumvent some of those limitations.

2) Consider the phenomenon of ‘outgrowing paganism’ in a couple different expressions, try to formulate a more coherent model for it.  That lengthy post is HERE.

3) Post on unconditional love is HERE.

4)  Develop discussion of unconditional love from a polytheistic perspective, focusing on the small community of devotees with worship in common, rather than with an overarching universal form of worship.  Parallel rather than immensely serial.  Begun HERE.