:: Michael Strmiska ::

Hello. Welcome to the personal web site of Michael Strmiska. Since August 2008, I have been a faculty member of the Global Studies Department of Orange County Community College, also known as SUNY-Orange, in Middletown NY, in the beautiful Hudson Valley area just north of New York City. I teach World History and Asian History. This comes after two years teaching World History at Cape Cod Community College in Massachusetts, and one year teaching at Central Connecticut State University in New Britain, Connecticut. In addition to my teaching, I conduct research on Pagan religions of ancient Europe and modern Pagan revival movements. My teaching and research draw on my international experiences in Europe and Asia, which are a very special part of my life that I am very proud of. From September 1996 through June 1997, I studied at the University of Iceland through a Fulbright Student Fellowship. I retain strong affection for the beautiful country of Iceland and the exciting city of Reykjavik. From January 1999 through July of 2004, I was a professor of Religious Studies and History at Miyazaki International College, a unique English-language, liberal arts college in Miyazaki, Kyushu, Japan. I developed a deep appreciation of ancient Japanese culture, including the Shinto religion, and also modern Japanese society. My favorite city in Japan is Nagasaki, which has a very unique character and many beautiful Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines. From September 2004 through June 2005, I was a Fulbright Fellow Lecturer in Religious Studies and Humanities at Siauliai University in Lithuania. I had visited Lithuania many times before this, and was already familiar with the exquisite capital city Vilnius and the coastal city of Klaipeda, as well as Kaunas, Lithuania's second city and home of the great Vytautas Magnus University. Siauliai was a poorer, rougher and more difficult place for me, and I learned a great deal about the stresses of post-Soviet life in Lithuania. I met many wonderful people, especially my intelligent and hard-working students. Apart from living in America, Iceland, Japan, and Lithuania, I have traveled to England, Wales, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Greece, Latvia and Russia, as well as China, Japan, Singapore and Korea.

I am very interested in religion, folklore, history and all the traditions that make each people and culture unique, and provide roots in the past that give nourishment to the hopes of the future. We should never be prisoners of history, but I also believe that we should not see ourselves as orphans or refugees from the past. Truly free people are able to choose from the past what they need, and adapt it for the present and future. I believe we should aspire to that freedom. In my work and life, I seek to play what small part I can to promote peace and tolerance between peoples, regions and religions, and am especially concerned with protecting and preserving traditional and indigenous religions under threat in the modern world. I am happy to have contact with others who share this goal, and I am always very glad to meet people with similar interests from the places I have been, especially Iceland, Japan, and the Czech Republic and Lithuania, lands of my ancestors. Some of my scholarly articles on Paganism can be found in the journals Nova Religio: The Journal of New and Emergent Religions and The Pomegranate: The International Journal of Pagan Studies. I am also a contributing editor for The Pomegranate. My two current research projects are (1) a study of the efforts by Scandinavian "Asatru" Pagans to defend themselves against associations with Nazism and racism, and (2) the introduction of forms of Eastern religion such as ISKCON (the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, aka "the Hare Krishnas") and Tibetan Buddhism into Eastern European countries such as Lithuania and Latvia.

In November of 2009, I presented two scholarly papers at the AAR (American Academy of Religion) conference in Montreal, Canada. One was about temples and sacred space in the Scandinavian Pagan movement Asatru. The other was about Eastern Religions in Lithuania, discussing my past fieldwork on the (Hindu) Hare Krishna/ISKCON and (Buddhist) Diamond Way movements. This is part of an ongoing research project about "Eastern Religions in Eastern Europe." I hope to collaborate with other scholars working on similar things in other Eastern European countries, and together produce a book.

In April of 2010, I am presenting another paper along the same lines, with some additional discussion of how modern Baltic Pagan movements are also influenced by Eastern religions, at the combined AABS/SASS conference in Seattle (AABS= Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies; SASS = Society for the advancement of Scandinavian Studies.) I am hoping to visit Latvia and Lithuania this summer (2010) to continue this research, looking both at neo-Pagan groups like Romuva and Dievturi, but also imported Asian religious movements like Hare Krishna/ISKCON and Diamond Way/Karma Kagyu.

In my own, personal spiritual development, I am seeking a way to combine the nature-centered traditions of Paganism with more universal forms of spirituality like Advaita Vedanta Hinduism or Buddhism. I am currently very unhappy with what I see in such forms of Paganism as American Asatru: too much focus on ethnic identity and on medieval warrior fantasies. This kind of focus lacks spiritual vision in my view, and leads in a bad direction, towards tribal exclusiveness and racism. My future work, both my scholarly publications and my musings on the blog "The Political Pagan" (at the site http://thepoliticalpagan.blogspot.com, link givenbelow ), will develop these concerns further.