Wednesday, October 30, 2019

As Hallowe'en Approaches….



My apologies to you readers of Bilgrimage for being away from this blog for so long. I may have mentioned at some point that I have been working for quite some time to co-author a book that will be published by University of Arkansas Press. The book, whose title is A Family Practice: The Russell Doctors and the Evolving Business of Medicine, 1799-1989, will come out this spring. I've co-authored it with a cousin of mine, Bill Russell, who is a descendant of the doctors discussed in the book, and Mary Ryan, formerly head librarian at the library of the University of Arkansas Medical School.


The book will come out this spring, and the proofs of the manuscript, which is now set and ready to print, reached me over a week ago. For over a week, I did almost nothing except comb the manuscript for missing periods, misplaced quotation marks — any mistakes remaining in the text after numerous revisions. Hence my absence from this blog….

I appreciate Sarasi for mentioning in a comment days back that the online Encyclopedia of Arkansas, which is maintained by the Butler Center for Arkansas Studies, a collaborative project of the Central Arkansas Library System and University of Arkansas at Little Rock, has published an article of mine entitled "Clergy Sexual Abuse." The folks maintaining this excellent online resource had asked me some time in the past to write this article, focusing on clergy sexual abuse within the state of Arkansas, and the link I've just provided points you to what I wrote. I'm providing this link in case anyone might find this resource useful.

Since I'm posting this on the even of Hallowe'en, a happy Hallowe'en to readers who have an interest in that particular holiday, whose roots lie in the so-called "pagan" cultures (specifically: Celtic cultures) now so feared and maligned by certain retrogressive groups within the Catholic orbit today. Here's a Twitter thread I posted about a portion of this discussion today — with apologies for how small the font is in the four quotations that follow (but if you click on the tweet, you'll be taken to Twitter where clicking on the quotation will enlarge it):






The photo of Hallowe'en pumpkin carvers is from the Prints and Photographic division of the U.S. Library of Congress (ID: cph.3b26545), and has been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons, with a note that it's in the public domain.

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