Pop the champagne!  At long last the proceedings of our April 2013 symposium with the University of South Carolina, "Sacred Lands and Spiritual Landscapes," have been published by ADF Publishing- Ár nDraíocht Féin.

Renowned scholar Ronald Hutton, keynoter for the symposium, graciously provided an introduction which also comments on each of the seven essays.  Congratulations to contributors Wendy Griffin (also editor), Sara Amis, Christina Beard-Moose, Hayes Hampton, Elinor Predota, Jeffrey Albaugh and Chas Clifton.  From my own preface:

"Pagan scholars are uniquely positioned to shift the center by recasting the human experience as an integrated part of the larger planetary bio-phenomenon.  For a generation raised in the wake of the first Earth Day, this only seems logical, and yet the predominant culture is either creationist or agnostically reductionist, or some uncomfortable détente between the two.  Most people say the want environmental protections, yet remain human-centered as the default position, unable to conceptualize something different, having never experienced the landscape as sacred.

" . . . [A] great many of us struggle to discern our own belonging to a landscape.  The American experience of the past few centuries has been marked by great immigration and migration sagas: English and Spanish explorers; white settlers; flights from European religious wars; the Cherokee Trail of Tears; the California Gold Rush; the Dust Bowl migrations, and more.  The lure of a seemingly infinite sweet of land and resources made it easy to think of roots as something that could be put down and taken up at will.  Only in the 20th century have the descendants of immigrants looked back to poinder what meaning can be found in former birthplaces.

"Our symposium writers were symbolic of this search for meaning.  For some, a sacred landscape is a particular place (e.g., Glastonbury), for others, a kind of ecosystem ("the woods").  Still others explored the culture that has emerged over time, shaped by its individual container or land, or artistic legacies derived from concepts of landscape. Our guest keynoter, Dr. Ronald Hutton, detailed the discovery and ensuring interpretive controversy over the Lindown Man, an Iron Age body found well-preserved in a peat bog.  Such variety, like that of the earth, signified that the symposium had barely tapped a subject embedded very deeply in our collective consciousness."  (pp. i - iii)

Hutton (center, above) says of Sacred Lands and Spiritual Landscapes, "It represents the proceedings of the first Pagan symposium to be held in the United State of America, in an academic setting, from which a publication has resulted.  This gives it both a special historic and a tighter focus, as it enables a reader to draw some conclusions from it concerning both the current nature of Paganism and of Pagan Studies in the Western world, and of the particular relationship of Paganism to place and landscape." (p. 1)