Alternative Spiritualities, the New Age and New Religious Movements in Ireland

[Defend the Sacred]

Going on now. Website and blog with updates at http://www.nrmireland.net or http://nrmireland.blogspot.com. Thanks to Paula from the Tara crew for sending this.

Alternative Spiritualities, the New Age and New Religious Movements in Ireland
Interdisciplinary conference at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth
October 30th - 31st, 2009

    - 44 presenters from 3 continents, not counting poster presentations
    - Established academics, independent scholars and postgrad researchers
    - Disciplines represented include anthropology, census and survey research, comparative studies, computing, education, ethnology, European Studies, folklore, history of art, human geography, Irish studies, psychology, religious studies, sociology and theology

National University of Ireland Maynooth
October 30th - 31st 2009

Plenary lectures:
- Prof. Tom Inglis, UCD, "A sociological map of religion in contemporary Ireland"
- Prof. Eileen Barker, LSE, "Cults, sects and / or new religions"
- Prof. Paul Heelas, Lancaster, "Spirituality and the New Age"

In recent decades, the religious landscape of the island of Ireland has transformed dramatically. New religious movements and what is sometimes called the "New Age" have flourished, along with the arrival of religions long-established elsewhere. Ways of being which classify themselves as non-religious or as consciously resisting religion (new spiritualities, humanism, skepticism, anti-cult organisations etc.) have also become far more significant. (The "newness" of any movement or group, and the "New Age" classification, are of course both often strongly contested, but are used here for practical purposes.)

These developments raise big questions for the study of religion, but also have important implications in fields as wide-ranging as gender relations, roads protests, the politics of church and state, immigration, tourism, funeral practices, education, youth cultures, health and regulation, globalization, and our relationship to the past, physical or imagined. They shed light on the transformation of religion in contemporary Ireland as well as providing us with insights into the nature of the society we live in.

This is the first conference to bring together academic research on these topics in Ireland, showcasing work on specific religious groups and movements, as well as more diffuse expressions of spirituality and religious organisation which have arrived, (re-)emerged or flourished in Ireland after 1945. It includes theoretical and empirical papers from a range of disciplines on many different aspects of these new movements in Ireland, including but not limited to "New Age" groups, pagan / Celtic movements, other new religious movements, world religions in Ireland, alternative medicine and bodywork, "cults" and schisms within established Irish churches, non- and anti-religious groups, and new religious movements abroad which have strong Irish roots or influences.

While the conference is dedicated to serious research, it is open to the public, either in whole or in part (one-day registration options are available, and the evening lectures can be attended separately at a special price). The conference is non-profit, and registration fees are simply to cover food, speakers' travel and accommodation costs, etc.

Paper topics include

- Globalisation, modernity and new religions in Ireland
- Questioning the "new religious movements" category
- New forms of religious affiliation
- New religious movements, media and cyberspace
- History of alternative religions in Ireland
- World religions in Ireland
- Celtic identities and religiosities
- The feminist divine
- Holistic spiritualities
- Christian new religious movements
- Rethinking new religious movements, Catholicism and Islam
- Psychology and religion
- Conceptualising and measuring religious beliefs

Online at http://www.nrmireland.net or http://nrmireland.blogspot.com:

- Full timetable and list of papers
- Registration details (early bird rate until Oct 15th)
- Call for poster presentations

All welcome; registration details and rates are on the websites.

The evening lectures by Prof. Barker (8 pm, Friday) and Prof. Heelas (8 pm, Saturday) can be attended separately; cost €20 or €10 for students / unwaged with ID

More details online at http://www.nrmireland.net or http://nrmireland.blogspot.com

[NDN_Outlaw]

I'd like to thank the Irish people for not going around the world colonizing other people. I once sat with an Irish story teller and we compared notes. I noticed there is a similar subtle humour that makes the intolerable tolerable. I told him about my search for some anscestors at Rocky Boy Reservation in Montana. They asked me if I drove through Havre on my way to their land. I told them I had. They then told me, "When you drove through Havre you may have driven over the very anscestors you came looking for." During the 1960s gravel containing the graves of the Cree dead near old Fort Assiniboine was mixed into asphalt and used to pave downtown Havre. The irony in this contained a most dark humour but one essential to tolerating the pain of it. He talked with me about the Hedge Row teachers. These dedicated individuals carried the heritage forward. We had such people on the northern plains. They wore their hair bundled up in front. They were called the horns or knotted hairs. They were gifted individuals who went freely among many tribes. They shared a mystical knowledge. In battles they would walk between the combatants crying for peace between enemies. They were old men who lived alone. There were Cree hunters in the Cypress Hills who encountered a knotted Hair. He came into their camp wailing with tears flowing down his face. "Be good to the buffalo",he cried, "for the day is coming and they will be no more." The hunters laughed at him and believed him insane. for the buffalo were thick upon the plains. The Irish professor and I shared a good conversation around a fire on a rocky island in northern Canada. English colonialism certainly hurt a lot of people.

[Defend the Sacred]

Go raibh maith agat (thank you), Mr. Outlaw ;-)

I also remember that when the famine of 1847 was wiping out my ancestors and relatives in Ireland, the Choctaw raised money to help them.

You're right, the Irish and Scottish Gaels also saw lorekeepers as sacred (and to some extent still do). Those who memorized the stories and kept them intact for future generations were usually of the same families who were also traditional seers and poets (the families of the filidh). Those in this line sometimes have photographic memories, though that ability can be damaged by age and illness. Often the filidh were the peacemakers between warring clans, sent out onto the battlefield under "bardic immunity" to negotiate terms. In a culture where reputation and honor mean more than long life, it's best to keep your epic poets and lore keepers alive ;-)

When the English outlawed the Gaelic language, drove people off their land, kidnapped their children and put them in boarding schools to beat their language and culture out of them (sound familiar?), the hedge schools carried on in secret. Some of the poets became monks in order to survive, and in order to learn how to write. Their dedication to writing down the tales is another way our cultures survived. Then the English crossed the water and employed the same genocidal tactics on the Indians that they'd practiced on the Gaels.

I recently read something in one of Sherman Alexie's short stories, where a woman is trying to figure out if a guy is an Indian or not. She notices his type of humour, and describes him as:  "Self-deprecating and bitter. He certainly talked like an Indian."  ... and I thought, "Yeah... or he could be Irish." ;-)

I tend to assume this is why my Irish and Scottish ancestors got on well with their NDN neighbors when the famines and clearances forced them onto the coffin ships and then into the Midwest. While so many "white" families have the shame of having genocidal monsters in their family trees, I am proud of being not only one of the members of the families of the filidh (two lines of Clan NicEoghainn, matrilineally), but immensely pleased that our family stories include things like pissing off the white neighbors by making guns for the Indians, an ancestor who was a traditional healer and midwife who seems to have worked with local Native folks to share what they knew, and others who counted Native people as their close friends and relatives.

But you know, we were also a Horse Culture... and Fishermen ;-)