In the coming month (or, by the beginning of summer), I will provide reviews of two books, Fritz Graf's Apollo and Jonathan Kirsch's God Against the Gods. If you have any items you think I should raise noise about (and this includes podcasts, other blogs, short publications, and projects you think are useful to the Hellenic community), please comment or E-mail me (my Gmail is annyihra). Now, though, I would like to turn towards a pan-pagan quarterly publication called Thorn Magazine.
You may remember my review of their first issue several months ago. You can read it here, but let me clip a bit:
Thorn looks like a very promising magazine, and Volume 1:1 did a decent job. Content I listed above makes it clear that it gives a voice to minority polytheistic faiths in addition to the concerns of Neo-Wiccans, but that also depends on the types of submissions the magazine acquires. I really liked the set topic idea for the recon faith articles because I think comparing how they do things is good for any outsiders who might read these articles. Thorn's formatting usually hits the mark: I approved of the editorial staff's header and footer designs, and they succeeded in attractively formatting titles' text. The advertisements were unobtrusive, yet noticeable, and very appropriate.
Volume 1, Issue 2 concentrates on the issue of race in Paganism, and it provides a wide array of thought-provoking articles. “Facing the Stormfront: Saving Paganism from Hate” cautioning us that ethnic/recon religions need to remain mindful of racial supremacists. Christine Hoff Kraemer looks at the ethics of respectful cultural exchange in “Cultural Borrowing/Cultural Appropriation: A Relationship Model for Respectful Borrowing,” and the section about Vodou and related diasporic religions was particularly informative for me as an individual with no background in them.
Thorn Magazine is quickly becoming a menagerie of pagan thought, providing snippets of diverse pagan faiths for the casual pagan/polytheistic reader. No one will like all of the writers in every issue, but the magazine serves to push readers outside of their comfort zones. Many of these articles provide human faces for trends within our many faiths and promotes a dialogue between disparate viewpoints, which is good considering the amount of bickering in and among our various communities. In my case, reading “High Days with the Bonewitses” was difficult because I disagree with Bonewits (about the need for doctrinal unity in modern paganism and prefer to approach the idea of pan-paganism as a pagan interfaith dialogue, not an endeavor to homogenize all practices in our various religions to back one set of beliefs and goals). The article helped me understand his goals a bit more clearly so that while I may still disagree with him about some things, I can at least respect where he's coming from. Any time we bridge gaps to understanding like this is valuable, and I thank
Thorn for giving me that experience.
Many of the formatting errors have been cleared up. While there is always more room for improvement, I found the font sizes and image placement much more intuitive and attractive. (However, to point out something that nags at my design intuition, the title text for “Grapevines” is lost in the beautiful grape background). There are very few obvious typographic errors. All in all, I give this issue an A-. This is a good grade coming from me. Rather than interpreting the minus as a deficit on
Thorn's part, think of it more as a recognition that
Thorn can and will grow.
Now that I have finished my discussion of the second issue, let me give you a rating breakdown for
Thorn:
Layout - 4.75/5
Editing (Grammar, spelling, formatting) - 4.25/5
Content - 5/5
Readability - 5/5
Overall - 4.5/5Want to check out some of these articles for yourself?
Thorn provides previews of some of them. To fully appreciate their chosen paper medium (and the great articles you cannot read in the preview), consider ordering a copy.
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