{"id":22,"date":"2006-09-03T10:41:13","date_gmt":"2006-09-03T10:41:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/apagansblog\/2006\/09\/back-at-last.html"},"modified":"2006-09-03T10:41:13","modified_gmt":"2006-09-03T10:41:13","slug":"back-at-last","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/apagansblog\/2006\/09\/back-at-last.html","title":{"rendered":"Back at last"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This blog has been silent most of the summer, largely due to my having been on a long road trip up into northern Ontario, then to California to give some papers on emergent order, followed by teaching a workshop in New Mexico.  Then I moved into a new place and visited Maine, my favorite part of the east.  Not much time even to see friends in the area, let alone blog.<\/p>\n<p>I did manage to read Tom Harpur&#8217;s The Pagan Christ, which is a good read until you check whether he can be backed up.  He can&#8217;t.  I was worried at the lack of documentation, and when I went to Amazon to see what some of the people he did cite had written, I found his key authority had no standing in Egyptology, a field central to harpur&#8217;s claims.  Further, he had written and self-published an astonishing number of books, which I take as a serious danger sign given the difficulty of doing rigorous research in the humanities.  As far as I have been able to determine to date, Harpur&#8217;s book is very unreliable.<\/p>\n<p>There also seem to be some excellent r<a href=\"http:\/\/www.tektonics.org\/harpur01.htm\">ebuttals<\/a>.<br \/>\nI should have found another summer read, or finished Yochai Benkler&#8217;s <em>The Wealth of Networks<\/em>.  This is an important book by a leading expert on the web, emergent order, and intellectaul property now teachint Law at Yale.  Benkler has made his book available to all who wish to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.benkler.org\/wealth_of_networks\/index.php\/Main_Page\">download<\/a> it from a website.  I haven&#8217;t finished it yet, the summer was too fragmented and I was distracted by the damn Harpur volume, but <em>Wealth<\/em> is marvelous so far, as well as being rooted in solid research.<em><br \/>\n<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This blog has been silent most of the summer, largely due to my having been on a long road trip up into northern Ontario, then to California to give some papers on emergent order, followed by teaching a workshop in New Mexico. Then I moved into a new place and visited Maine, my favorite part&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Back at last - A Pagan&#039;s Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/apagansblog\/2006\/09\/back-at-last.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Back at last - A Pagan&#039;s Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This blog has been silent most of the summer, largely due to my having been on a long road trip up into northern Ontario, then to California to give some papers on emergent order, followed by teaching a workshop in New Mexico. Then I moved into a new place and visited Maine, my favorite part&hellip;\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/apagansblog\/2006\/09\/back-at-last.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"A Pagan&#039;s Blog\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2006-09-03T10:41:13+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Gus diZerega\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Back at last - A Pagan&#039;s Blog","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/apagansblog\/2006\/09\/back-at-last.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Back at last - A Pagan&#039;s Blog","og_description":"This blog has been silent most of the summer, largely due to my having been on a long road trip up into northern Ontario, then to California to give some papers on emergent order, followed by teaching a workshop in New Mexico. 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