Everything! Cherry Hill Seminary News has a new look. We have a new, cleaner template with just one sidebar to make reading the blog easier. The new color scheme recalls the Cherry Hill Seminary website. Also new are an About page, buttons to our RSS feed and Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn accounts. We’ve also added a Share button so you can easily share any piece of news via email or through social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. We hope you’ll find the blog more enjoyable.
Sep 082010
Sep 082010
Why take classes with Cherry Hill Seminary? As Mari Elm, current student in the Pagan Pastoral Counseling department, says, “What I’ve learned in my brief vocation as clergy is that I am not anywhere near adequately prepared to counsel people for such emotional/psychological disorders. This is why I’m back in school, earning a Master of Divinity degree with a focus on pastoral care and counseling. I need to be a safe resource for my ministry patrons, and part of that safety involves knowing where the line is between when I can help and when it is time to refer that person to a properly trained, competent professional.”
Cherry Hill Seminary is offering the following courses this fall:
- Media Outreach for Pagan Groups and Organizations
- Research & Writing in Pagan Studies
- Effective Web Development for Pagan Organizations
- Erotic Ethics
- A Saunter With Muir & Whitman
- Call of the Dark Mother
- Paganism and the Body
- Starting a Spiritually-Centered Business
- Creativity, Madness and the Pagan Spirit
- Human Development in a Pagan Context
The following courses need more students to register:
- Western Initiation - needs at least one more student to run
- American Spiritualities - needs at least two more students to run
- Global Paganisms - needs at least two more students to run
- A Saunter With Muir and Whitman - will be running, but more students are welcome to join
- Starting a Spiritually-Centered Business - still has room for students to join
The following courses have been canceled:
- Rites of Passage
- Warrior in Shadow
- Religion & the Law
- Spirit of Economics
For more information about these courses and to register, visit our main website.
Sep 032010
Are you creative, reliable and tech-savvy? CHS is looking for a webmaster. This is a volunteer position with specific responsibilities and the expectation of roughly ten hours per week work. If you are a CHS student, you are entitled to a modest discount on your tuition. Applicants should submit a resume, three references, and provide copies of or links to samples of web design work you have done.
Sep 032010
Building Community is the theme for next year’s 7th Conference for Current Pagan Studies in Claremont, CA.
Papers are now being accepted for the conference. It’s open to many areas of research in the field Pagan Studies, but they are particularly looking for papers that explore Pagan theo/alogies, outlooks, artistic values, etc. and whether or not they can be helpful in building community. Abstracts should be no more than 200 words and should be submitted by November 10. For more information, please visit the Pagan Conference website.
Sep 032010
The Reverend Michael Walker is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, with a 25-year history in the Pagan community. His academic vita includes a Master of Divinity from Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley and a Master of Arts in Humanities and Leadership from New College of California, formerly in San Francisco. He is currently a distance doctoral student at Saybrook University, based in San Francisco.
He serves as an officer on the national Board of Trustees of the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans. He has served on boards and steering committees for various groups within the Pagan community since 1989; he has also served on various committees and boards associated with the GLBT community, for HIV services (Michael was formerly a nurse), and in academia and UU churches.
Today, he is a Resident Minister and the Administrative Manager at the UU Rowe Camp and Conference Center in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. He lives in the intentional community that operates Rowe Center. In the past, he was an Adjunct Professor at Starr King School for the Ministry (teaching about Paganism to Pagan, UU and Christian graduate students), and in August 2010, he joined the faculty of Cherry Hill Seminary. An alumnus of Pacific School of Religion and ordained by the First Unitarian Universalist Society of San Francisco, he became one of a handful of Pagan UU ministers who are getting very good at rocking the boat.
Believing in the right of all Pagans to live as they choose, and to be accepted by mainstream society, he has been involved with the International Pagan Pride Project and other Pagan advocacy organizations. During 2004-05, he served as a Co-Chair for the San Diego (CA) Pagan Pride Day event, and is very proud of how they have continued to grow and flourish after he moved away. ‘Pagan ministry’ – two words that are not often heard spoken in the same sentence – it is one of Michael’s lifelong goals to help change that. For him, ministry includes (among other things) providing social services (chaplaincy, elder care, and other special assistance) to members of the community during their times of greatest need. Since he finally came to the conclusion that the Pagan community was not growing up fast enough to provide the types of ministry that he wished to be part of, he branched out and developed a relationship with Unitarian Universalism. It is his goal to provide ministry in both spiritual communities, together and (if necessary) separately.
In his personal life, he is a single gay man, living in rural Massachusetts with his beloved black cat, Kali. He loves Celtic and world music, reads science fiction and fantasy, and believes that his artistic pursuits are a spiritual practice. He formerly owned an art gallery in San Diego, and is a weaver, sculptor and lapidary/jewelry-maker, although he doesn’t currently offer his artwork commercially. He is a veteran of the US Navy, having served in the U.S. and Japan.
Michelle Mueller will lead a Pagan Book Discussion Group at the UU church where she works. The group will read and discuss Aradia, or the Gospel of the Witches, The Metamorphoses of Apuleius, and their influence on modern Wicca and Paganism. Meetings are the first Tuesday of every month, starting on Sept. 7, at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Cherry Hill, NJ. Meetings are free and open to anyone in the area, but there will be a charge to cover the cost of printing. Michelle may develop a literature/theology course for CHS with these sources in the future.
Media Outreach For Pagan Groups & Organizations: A Foundations Course by Jason Pitzl-Waters
In an age of ubiquitous social media, conveying your organization’s goals and values in an effective manner is more important than ever. Pagan groups and organizations used to have to deal with exploitative, uneducated, or even hostile mainstream media outlets in order to get the word out, but now we’re lucky if the local paper or television station even has time for any religion-oriented story. The last decade has seen some major upheavals and cutbacks in the areas of traditional media, with religion beats being cut back or eliminated across the United States. However, while traditional media outlets have been cutting back, there’s been an expansion on the Internet. As a result, its never been easier for small groups to create and disseminate information to the wider world.
Join us for the 4-week Foundations course Media Outreach For Pagan Groups & Organizations at Cherry Hill Seminary, starting on September 14. Instructor Jason Pitzl-Waters, creator of The Wild Hunt and co-founder of the Pagan Newswire Collective, will help you develop an outreach strategy that utilizes new media solutions, targets the audience you want to reach, prepares you for mainstream media attention, and gives you the tools to find your organization’s voice in a veritable digital cacophony. We’ll be using a simple and easy-to-remember system based on the traditional “Witches’ Pyramid” (aka Four Powers of the Magus or Four Powers of the Sphinx) to walk you through the process. This is a must for any public relations person, public information officer, or press liaison that is unsure how to fully utilize the new media landscape.
Week 1: To Know
The first week we’ll look at why understanding the importance of new/social media is vital to furthering your organization’s message, and explore who you are actually trying to reach.
Week 2: To Will
We’ll discuss why having a dedicated media/press liaison is important, why organizational support is vital, and how to stay committed to outreach for the long haul.
Week 3: To Dare
We’ll explore trying new methods of outreach, why being bold is an asset on the Internet, and why you shouldn’t be afraid to change things that aren’t working.
Week 4: To Keep Silent
Issues of transparency, secrecy, dirty laundry, drama, and flame wars will be touched on.
Each week will include special exercises and assignments that will prepare you and your group for the future. This is a hands-on course that will familiarize you with the latest tools, and talk about how you can get the attention you want without compromising your values.
Aug 282010
We in America live in a country founded by Europeans seeking a place to practice their religions. From Puritans in New England to Quakers in Pennsylvania to Catholics in Maryland, people came to this continent from places where their views were not tolerated in order to be free of religious persecution. Further, they erected their churches and meeting houses upon land sacred to the peoples who already inhabited it. In fact, massacres occurred on or near some of the sites now occupied by buildings erected for religious gatherings and worship.
Since the early days of the founding our our republic, this country has grown in diversity until now a cultural and religious tapestry woven of wondrous threads from many parts of the world spreads across the land. Those indigenous to this land practice their own religions, religions and spiritual perspectives have been brought here from other places, and this land has engendered new religions.
The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees all Americans the right to assemble peaceably. As practitioners of the “ancient-future” Pagan religions, we at Cherry Hill Seminary support the right of all Americans to express their spirituality, and to honor their cultures of origin, wherever they choose.
As the battle rages on as to whether an Islamic community center should open its doors two blocks from the New York site where the Twin Towers once stood, Americans are being tested on their level of tolerance and just how important the First Amendment really is. ABC News has a story examining these issues and while some say Americans aren’t as tolerant as we think we are, Cherry Hill Seminary’s Patrick McCollum says the struggle is a sign of growth.
I think that the intolerance that we’re experiencing right now is that for the first time in a long period of time, since almost the founding of our country, we’ve actually begun to ALLOW pluralism to surface in our country. So we’ve started to uphold the ideals that our country was founded on … and the people who’ve been in the dominant position begin to feel like they’re under attack.
You can read the rest of the ABC article here.
