CONGRESS CANCELED Genuine Survivals, Cute Theories, and Wishful Thinking: Sorting Wheat from Chaff in Medieval Scholarship about Polytheism
Description
Evidence from Insular Celtic (especially Irish and Welsh) sources has been heavily employed in attempting to understand the pre-Christian religious cultures and theologies of Celtic peoples, sometimes in concert with Romano-British/Gaulish artifacts and epigraphy. But, since many of the scholars engaged in this work are atheists or monotheists with often unacknowledged (anti-) religious biases, and may be excellent philologists yet lack any training in religious studies, how trustworthy are their findings, which then sometimes inspire and influence modern polytheists in their own pursuits of spiritual development?
This session will focus upon both “the good” and “the questionable” in terms of such studies produced through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, how these have been accepted or dismissed within their individual disciplinary discourses, and likewise how these flawed or fair assessments of the material have been deployed in modern pagan and polytheistic writings and practices. Phillip A. Bernhardt-House
CONGRESS CANCELED Genuine Survivals, Cute Theories, and Wishful Thinking: Sorting Wheat from Chaff in Medieval Scholarship about Polytheism
Valley 3 Stinson 306
Evidence from Insular Celtic (especially Irish and Welsh) sources has been heavily employed in attempting to understand the pre-Christian religious cultures and theologies of Celtic peoples, sometimes in concert with Romano-British/Gaulish artifacts and epigraphy. But, since many of the scholars engaged in this work are atheists or monotheists with often unacknowledged (anti-) religious biases, and may be excellent philologists yet lack any training in religious studies, how trustworthy are their findings, which then sometimes inspire and influence modern polytheists in their own pursuits of spiritual development?
This session will focus upon both “the good” and “the questionable” in terms of such studies produced through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, how these have been accepted or dismissed within their individual disciplinary discourses, and likewise how these flawed or fair assessments of the material have been deployed in modern pagan and polytheistic writings and practices. Phillip A. Bernhardt-House