Hello! If you stopped by our booth at Quad Day, then I’m glad you found your way here, but if you didn’t then let me give you a run down of what we shared with others there:
We’re a fairly social group of Pagans at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign that usually tries to host a number of events throughout both semesters of the school year. These often include workshops to discuss various aspects of Paganism, a Divination Fair as a fundraiser, and social nights when we can all just get together and relax. To keep up with all the current activities, watch this site (which we’re going to really, really going to try and keep more current this year) and join our mailing list if you haven’t done so already at Quad Day.
With respect to the greater Champaign-Urbana Pagan community, there is a Pagan Night Out (PNO) that takes place on the thirteenth of every month at 7PM at the Espresso Royal at Oregon and Goodwin in Urbana. There are also a few local Pagan mailing lists, none of which are too active so you don’t have to worry about too much spam. They are:
- Pagan Night Out – an automatic reminder about PNO.
- CU Pagan – a more general mailing list that hits local Pagan members of the community.
We’ll be planning a get together likely for next week so that we can all get through all of the other meetings that organizations schedule during the first week of classes. Watch your in-boxes or the calendar on this site for more information!
The New Jersey Board of Education voted to add Pagan holidays to their list of religious holidays during which students can be absent during the 2010-2011 school year. For more information, check out this post at examiner.com.
There’s not much more to say other than to suggest that you read more information at The Wild Hunt, but the short version is this:
Patrick McCollum was seeking a position as a chaplain to Pagan inmates in California prisons. His application was turned down because the current rules prohibit paid chaplains for anyone that isn’t Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, or a follower of a Native American religion. The courts have been dealing with the case for five years, but recently it has received some more attention.
More information can be found at the Wild Hunt: Patrick McCollum’s Case Hits the Mainstream.
Syracuse University has appointed Mary Hudson its first Pagan chaplain this year become what is likely only the second U.S. college or university to have one. A Pagan chaplain, that is; I suspect a number of colleges and universities have “Mary Hudsons!” The other unviersity, according to the Daily Orange report, is the University of Southern Maine.
You can read more information online at the Daily Orange, an independent campus newspaper at Syracuse.
Come and join us on Wednesday in the Illini Union for our first panel during the Spring 2010 semester! Our panel during the Fall was very successful and we’re hoping for a great turnout and an engaged audience with a lot of interesting questions. After the panel we’ll head downstairs to the Illini Union Courtyard Café if anyone wants to continue chatting!
Greetings and welcome to the new Pagan Students Association web site! For a long time, our web master has been handling the web site without the assistance of any sort of management tool. But now, we’re rocking with WordPress. This should make it easier for other members of the PSA to update the site and keep you informed about all the various things that we’re doing out here in Illinois.
Plus, WordPress pretty much just gives us a blog without us having to do anything. So keep your self glued to our site (okay, not really) for updates and news from around Illinois and the world as we post things that catch our eye or just seem interesting to Pagans, and student Pagans more specifically. If you want to, you can subscribe to our feed in the usual way for your browser (probably by clicking the little orange feed icon somewhere near your address bar).
Spring 2010 is going to be an important few months in the life of the PSA. We need to do some serious work to find some new members. And, we’re hamstrung in this because we missed out on the University’s Activity Day at the end of January. Plus, as our fearless leader, Tamilia, approaches her graduation, her work load is only increasing. If you’re a member (or if you’re not but want to become one) we’re probably looking to hand over the keys and let someone move into the presidential palace before too much longer.
Our events for the semester are posted and after the smashing success of our first-ever panel on Paganism last semester, we’ve decided to try and do two more this semester. Our first will be on magick and we hope to clarify the difference between it and magic (without the “k”) as well as covering things like its similarities and differences to prayer, how it’s performed by modern Pagans, and why a person might want to use it (or avoid it) in different situations.
We’re also planning our divination fair for this semester, too. In the past, we’ve done a number of smaller fairs throughout the semester, but these suffered from poor attendance and forced our readers to free up a lot of time in their busy schedules. So, this time we’re just going to do one of them but we’re going to try and make it bigger, better, and more awesome than ever before! We’re not sure exactly what that means, but we’ll figure it out.
Keep watching here for more information about the PSA at UIUC we’ll keep you posted as things develop for this semester and beyond!
