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Liguria is not a place on Earth. It’s a state of mind. Portofino (Liguria, Italy). 2022 Leonardo Ambasciano (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
https://journal.equinoxpub.com/JCH/index © Equinox
All good things must come to an end.
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Going to the seaside? Or trekking through mountains? You don’t have to choose here, you can have both! The Church of S. Anna ai Monti with the Gallinara Island in the background, as seen from Via Julia Augusta, between Albenga and Alassio (Liguria, Italy). 2021 Leonardo Ambasciano (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
This is the visual story of how an Autumn road trip through the Italian region where my family comes from helped me clear my mind after experiencing the most hellish situation at home.
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Money, by 401(K) 2012 (CC BY-SA 2.0). From Flickr.
I recently had the pleasure of exchanging a couple of emails with a colleague of mine regarding my latest published article, He Who Pays the Piper Calls the Tune. In that article, I expanded some of the topics I presented in my speech during the 2021 BASR Annual Conference held (virtually) in Edinburgh.
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Protect yourself and those you love and care about. No ifs, no buts. Photograph by Marco Verch Professional Photographer, from Flickr (CC BY 2.0).
On 20 August 2021 I got vaccinated.
I asked the doctor at the vaccination centre about adverse reactions. The doctor hastily explained the potential side effects to me. I was far from being satisfied but then again I am quite the realist. In 2006 I was run over by a car while crossing the street on a zebra crossing and with the pedestrian green light on – as a result, I think I have an intuitive grasp of the unmerciful nature of statistics. In any case, it’s not rocket science: better to bet on a vaccine doing its work than risking death or some lifelong organ damage by catching a nasty bug. I gave my consent and the nurse proceeded to give me three jabs on both arms that granted me immunisation against diphtheria, whooping cough, measles, mumps, rubella, tetanus, and chickenpox.
Three days earlier, a 20+ year high-school friendship crumbled and disintegrated because the friend in question had embraced nasty no-vax beliefs.
One month earlier, I had my second Comirnaty (Pfizer BioNTech) Covid-19 vaccine shot.
Two months earlier, a relative told her oncologists that she did not want to be vaccinated against Covid-19 because she “wasn’t ready to die.”
And then, I suffered a complete breakdown.
But let’s start from the beginning, shall we?
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Another place, another time. Liguria, Italy. 2016, (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Leonardo Ambasciano.
In 2019 I saw the effects of man-made climate change with my own eyes.
It was a scorching 40°C outside, well above the usually mild June temperatures of the Ligurian Riviera. The air was blistering hot, like the devil’s breath. The pitiful shrubs and the wilted flowerbeds on the sidewalk reminded me of something from a bygone era, like fossilised remains of a poor urban planning from another century. The few and far-between palms on the boulevard provided no shade at all. An elderly lady fainted a few metres from me, collapsing lifeless on the ground.
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Exchange Building, University of Nottingham. Source: Wikipedia; author: mattbuck.
Introduction to the Critical and Interdisciplinary Study of Religion 101: A work in progress.
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Dang, it’s gonna take more than one whole minute to rewind all that tape, provided that the VHS cassette does not get stuck inside the VCR! … and you thought you had issues with your movie loading slowly on Netflix! Ah, kids these days…
Author: Groink (CC BY-SA 3.0). Source: Wikipedia
I was born eight months after the release of Return of the Jedi in theatres. For all intent and purposes, the Star Wars saga was over. But its legacy was just beginning. It might have been 1991 when I got hold of a worn-out VHS on which my sister had recorded The Empire Strikes Back live from a commercial broadcaster. There was no fancy sticker on it, no logo, no information whatsoever. It was just a black box with a brownish magnetic tape visible through the transparent plastic and a badly handwritten title on the spine. Nothing that could prepare me for what was I about to experience.
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Fig. 1. Source: Rennie (2017). Fair use of the copyrighted material for edicational purposes, commentary, and criticism.
Any critical and epistemologically warranted comment against the old phenomenological paradigm in the History of Religions is usually declassed by interested apologists as unworthy of attention - like Eliade taught the field to do - and/or labeled in such a way as to elicit hatred and dodge the issue at stake. It is also a form of begging the question to strengthen one’s defence. And as such, it is a dangerous fallacy.
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Sources in chronological order: HuffPost, 3 May 2018 (the bust in the middle was vandalized in 2018; in 2020 the statue was toppled by protesters); BBC News, 8 June 2020; BBC News, 9 June 2020; The Virginian Pilot, 10 June 2020; BBC News, 11 June 2020; Sky News Italy, 14 June 2020; CNN, 19 June 2020. An updated list of monuments toppled or removed during the 2020 protests is available on Wikipedia. Composition © 2021, L. Ambasciano.
It’s quite mind-boggling how the most toxic scholars of the past in the academic study of religion(s) have escaped unscathed the BLM movement’s criticism or the fury of cancel culture. How come statues like those dedicated to Churchill, Washington, Columbus, Confederates, slave traders, and racists all the world over were defaced or toppled down last year while the busts of Mircea Eliade are still standing? How is it possible that a chair at the University of Chicago is still entitled to Eliade while cancel culture is reclaiming so many academic and intellectual victims almost on a daily basis?
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