Collection: Religious Ephemera Part 2

 My first piece in today's post is something my son brought home for me from school, given to him by a friend for a laugh. I have a fair bit of respect for much of the ephemera that grows up around religions. I don't always necessarily agree with the tenets they proscribe, but I admire the dedication to one's faith that drives people to offer this kind of secondary writing. If more fundamentally religious people dedicated themselves to the pen, and not the sword, we'd have a far more interesting world.

That said, I think I fail (or pass, depending on your point of view) this test.

It's a well-recognized fact that many religious organizations find new converts amongst the lost and directionless of the university campus. I do truly believe that these groups, the ones that have a table in the student center, or who advertise on the bulletin boards, have altruistic origins, even if their practice is not quite the same as their praxis. I find numerous pieces of this ephemera tacked up to the boards I walk by on my way to and fro in the school. These three pamphlets were packaged together, and I've got a couple of other bundles too. Though of slightly higher quality than something like Bill Ashmore's exegesis from the previous post, they're still products of an independent press seeking to offer elucidation of Christian principles. What I think would be interesting about these sorts of works would be to compare their conclusions to the more rigorous and accepted interpretive texts.

My final piece for today is a bit of a joke, though one with some teeth. In my first year of the PhD program, I was given a research position (more a "catalogue this office" position, really) that involved going through a large collection of amateur science fiction fanzines from the mid-70s and "bibliographizing" them. A substantial portion of collection was a publication called Minneapa, and within one of the issues was this send-up of dogmatic religion. My own thinking on religion accords something like this just as much veracity as any other piece of ephemera, and it's kind of amusing in its own right. As you can see, it's credited to Al Kuhfeld, who was a regular contributor to the zine. Hopefully he doesn't mind my reproducing it here.

That's it for this installment. See you next time.