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3 unusual facts about Pagan studies


Pagan studies

Pagan studies scholar Chas S. Clifton argued that the discipline had developed as a result of the increasing "academic acknowledgement" of contemporary Paganism's "movement into the public eye", referring to the emergence of Pagan involvement with interfaith groups and the Pagan use of archaeological monuments as "sacred sites", particularly in the United Kingdom.

The earliest academic studies of contemporary Paganism were published in the late 1970s and 1980s by scholars like Margot Adler, Marcello Truzzi and Tanya Luhrmann, although it would not be until the 1990s that the actual Pagan studies discipline properly developed, pioneered by academics such as Graham Harvey and Chas S. Clifton.

In 1999, the American sociologist Helen A. Berger of West Chester University published A Community of Witches, a sociological study of the Wiccan and Pagan movement in the north-eastern United States.



see also

Pagan Theology

Writing in volume 6.1 of The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies (2004), the journal's editor, Chas S. Clifton of Colorado State University–Pueblo, made reference to York's work in his discussion of the definition of Pagan studies.