A Double Issue of The Pomegranate

What is it about?

Thanks to guest editors Inga Bårdsen Tollefsen of the University of Tromsø, Norway, and Manon Hedenborg-White, Uppsala University, Sweden, this issue includes a section of interesting papers on gender issues within several varieties of contemporary Pagaism and esotericism, ranging from Canada to Russia. Tollefsen and James Lewis’s own quantitative research on gender among Pagans in several countries, as reported through national census data, is complemented by Lewis’s collaboration with another Tromsø scholar, Sverre Andreas Fekjan, on educational levels among contemporary Pagans in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United Kingdom, published here as “research note.” Another group of short articles were developed from a panel sponsored by the Contemporary Pagan Studies Group in the American Academy of Religion during the 2013 AAR annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland. It was a response to a review essay by a Danish scholar, Markus Altena Davidsen, titled “What Is Wrong with Pagan Studies,” published in 2012 in the journal Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, in which he reviewed the 2009 edited collection by James R. Lewis and Murphy Pizza, Handbook of Contemporary Paganism, published by Brill in their Handbooks on Contemporary Religion series.

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