While I don’t think it makes sense to simply mimic what they did, it’s a great starting point for noodling session ideas. For instance, after the opening remarks and prayers, the first session was a keynote address about “Organized Modern Polytheism”, dealing with lots of practical questions- legal and tax status, clergy training programs, and the like.

There were a number of sessions with a similarly practical focus, such as “Wellness in Contemporary Polytheism”, “Embracing Hope: Polytheism, Community, and Addition”, and “On Being New”.

Other sessions were more theological, for instance “What is a God? Towards an Immanent Theology”, “Henotheism and Monotheism”, “The Language of Deity”, and “On the Gods and the Good”.

Finally, others bridged this division, such as “Polytheism for Contemporary America”, “Ancestor Work and Indigeny”, and “Finding Common Cause Amidst Many Gods”. This last set is especially significant (not that I intend to diminish the others at all) in grappling with the idea of a shared way forward as modern polytheisms face larger and larger challenges and threats.

This is, I believe the Gods’ purpose for Hearthingstone- to transform the nascent pockets of Their faiths into rooted, thriving, health, and durable communities.

Doing that will require all kinds of knowledge- theological, scholarly, esoteric, practical, ritual, experiential, and logistical. In the back of my mind flitters the notion that this might one day require seminaries, but for now the work is in networking- sharing knowledge and resources between polytheist leaders…

A mycelium for polytheism.

In addition to the great information I got from the 2014 PLC book, I’ve also been on the lookout for ideas elsewhere. Here are some other ideas that were inspired by various posts in the polytheist blogosphere:

• Monotheism’s Mindgames – Preparing oneself against the onslaught of logic traps and “rational” arguments bombarding us from modern society.
• Joyful Devotion – Practicing your faith with gravitas and respect without falling into Calvinism’s trap of self-flagellation.
• Towards Vernacular Polytheism – Reestablishing the indigeny of our traditions, rooting them in place and the Gods and spirits thereof.
• The Social Capital Problem – Modern society imposes a zero-sum view of selfhood and agency that afflicts many in our communities as well. How can we, as polytheist leaders, overcome this in ourselves and lead our tribes to a healthier self-identity?
• Issues of Hierarchy – While many polytheists recognize the need for defined roles and leadership, modern society encourages people to view hierarchy as something to climb or overcome. How can we, as polytheist leaders, bridge this divide in our traditions?
• Weirdness on the Rise – Reports of the seemingly impossible appear to be escalating- but why and to what end?

-In Deos Confidimus

The post Noodling Session Ideas appeared first on Hearthingstone.

If I’m collecting 5¢ cans, it might take me awhile to find 120,000 of them!

Let’s start with an obvious “gotcha”- Wedding Season! In talking with one of the 2014 organizers, she noted that in her area October, May, and June are the big months. September is also popular, according to some articles I found. Here in Austin, it might be a bit earlier, in the spring, but I’m having trouble confirming one way or the other. Then again, being sunny most of the year probably spreads the weddings out a bit more.

That said, we’re not just trying to avoid conflicts with weddings locally, but to minimize the odds of a possible presenter (or attendee, for that matter) having a scheduling conflict.

Another time of year with MASSIVE scheduling conflicts is the November-December holiday season. Aside from significant holy days in a number of traditions, many folks have practical considerations- kids out of school, families to visit, and the like.

I’ve considered January, since many academic folks have a slight reprieve then and people from northern climes might appreciate weather that ranges from just below freezing into what would be considered full-spring temperatures elsewhere. However, January is also “Cedar Season“, when the Mountain Junipers make love with each other and war upon the sinuses of many a human.

So out of 12 months, we’ve already raised serious concerns about 7 of them!

February doesn’t seem to have any major problems (except for the possibility of lingering “cedar fever”), but it doesn’t have any significant plusses either. Most academics are back to class, people are still paying off credit cards from the holidays, and so forth. In my line of work, we call this “The Doldrums” because business tends to be slow. Then again, maybe that’s a recommendation?

March in Austin is dominated by South-by-Southwest (SXSW), an enormous multidisciplinary conference that eats just about every venue in town. There’s also a massive rodeo and another large film festival during the month. The traffic can get bad enough downtown that some folks take a vacation to be away from the area! I’d love to do March, because it’s typically a beautiful time of year, full of wildflowers and such. But it’s likely to be trouble.

April is also nice, though typically a bit more rainy (go figure, right?). It’s also a heavy allergy season.

May and June are prime wedding months and May has tons of graduations. Here in Austin, late May is sometimes Monsoon Season (and sometimes not). While lots of folks are out of school by mid-June, June is also Pride Month for many of our possible attendees. As an aside, Austin celebrates PRIDE in mid-August.

July and August are hot. If you are not used to the Southwest or Deep South, this is not a good time to be out and about- air conditioning is your friend. While we don’t have random stuff melting all over town like Tucson did awhile back, we did have a giant cowboy boot burst into flames. Okay, it was probably a wiring fault, but still. Some tortilla chips totally did spontaneously combust TWICE within the last two weeks, though.

September is wedding season again, and can still be quite hot. Fantastic Fest happens in September, which suggests it might be a reasonable enough time to hold indoor events.

October is back into prime wedding season, and though the weather is usually nice here- Austin City Limits Music Festival dominates the downtown for the first two weekends. The United States Grand Prix and Austin Film Festival eat up a lot of hotels during the latter part of the month. That said, we have a pretty decent Dia de los Muertos event.

And, with that we’re back around to November and December. These also tend to be pretty nice, weather wise. Early November might be less hectic for people, though academics will still generally be in class. By late December we are back into Cedar Season again.

What am I forgetting?

-In Deos Confidimus

The post Date Considerations appeared first on Hearthingstone.

Obviously, programming is a huge concern. I touched on this in another post, but just knowing how many of what kinds of sessions you want to provide is just the beginning. Here are some example questions that need answering:

• How will we locate good people to run those sessions?
• How will we fill sessions for which we are having trouble locating people?
• Will speakers, facilitators, etc. receive free or discounted admission, and if so, by how much and for how many sessions?
• Will we pay travel expenses for some of those people? Who and why?
• How do we determine what sessions go into what event spaces?

Obviously, there are a lot more questions, but those are some of the highlights.

Another issue to consider is vendors. It is not unusual for conferences to have vendors, who may or may not pay for the space they occupy. While Hearthingstone is primarily a conference about religious issues, many traditions do not separate commercial activities from the sacred. Furthermore, a large number of polytheist leaders support themselves or substantially supplement meager incomes through vending.

However, offering a dedicated vendor space with rented tables presents liability concerns, such as the provision of security and the need to carry additional insurance. I know of some conventions that fell down in this regard, and it was not pretty.

Speaking of meager incomes, it is not unusual for conventions to have a hospitality suite that provides light refreshments to any attendee free of charge. Based on past experience, we should expect that at least a few attendees will be in need of more substantial food. While Austin has ample supermarkets and restaurants, some of them operating 24 hours a day, not every attendee will have the means to make use of them. Hearthingstone will probably need to find a way to supplement these folks’ food supply.

In addition to food, many of our traditions involve the offering of alcohol, tobacco, and the like. Because Texas is a “blue law” state, we will need to make sure that attendees are made aware of the location and closing times of nearby sources, as well as legal limitations such as areas where smoking is prohibited.

One of the important ways of communicating this, and other important information is the convention program book. There are a great many questions to answer around this publication.

For instance- what paper size do we print it on? Smaller books are more portable and easier to lose, while larger books are easier to read but less easy to carry around and are generally more expensive.  Just a quick glance at Office Depot’s website tells me that even a spartan 12-page book will cost between $1.60 and $2.30 per copy for a black-and-white book.

Since Hearthingstone is partly about networking, it might make sense to print a small contact blurb for each pre-registered attendee (unless they opt out). Even at a minimal size, that’s potentially 5 or so extra pages for 100 people, more if we include space for a small picture. We could put these online instead, but building a way to show it only to registered attendees could be tricky. Do we put the book online?

Speaking of opting out, while many Hearthingstone attendees are public representatives of their traditions and/or communities, we can’t forget that some may still have very good reasons to keep their names and faces separate from their faith. We will need a way of balancing the educational benefits of recording sessions and sharing them afterward with the need to allow some folks to opt out of appearing in public. The same applies to any press releases or other media attention we eventually decide is appropriate for the conference- how do we raise the profile of polytheisms generally while protecting attendees whose identities need to remain private?

Lots to think about…

-In Deos Confidimus

The post Some Practical Considerations appeared first on Hearthingstone.