The Lost Column of Reed M. N. Weep

Abstract

Congratulations to the Bulletin for the Study of Religion, which has reached the golden age when it can join AARP! This used to stand for the American Association of Retired Persons, but now it is just the noise you make to let someone know you are in need of the Heimlich Maneuver. But I digress. I, Alumno Sinllanto, have been invited to participate in the celebration of this auspicious milestone as the chief, and indeed only, student of one of the Bulletin’s most influential contributors, Reed M. N. Weep. In columns published between 1997 and 2011, Professor Weep exposed the craven lies that we tell ourselves in the academic study of religion, and he told a few jokes. With his mysterious disappearance in 2011, a unique voice was silenced. In fact, a grand total of two readers have told me that his column was the first thing they turned to in the Bulletin, which was 100 per cent of that periodical’s subscriber base at the time.

Those readers, if they are still alive themselves, will be happy to learn that Professor Weep’s voice actually has not quite been silenced. As a graduate assistant at a large mid-western university, along with the menial and demeaning tasks I was usually assigned, I was given the high honor by the department chair of organizing the papers in Professor Weep’s office after he had absconded. I believe his exact words were “Get rid of this worthless crap.” Little did he know that in the “worthless crap” I would find a valuable gem, a never before published column by the man himself. Professor Weep told me that, when he was in graduate school, a musicology student discovered a previously unknown piano concerto by Franz Liszt, which was premiered by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. “Those of us who claimed in our dissertations to have found something new,” the story concluded, “were toast.” Now, I, Alumno Sinllanto, find myself in the same enviable position as that musicologist: You grad students can eat your hearts out. Below the column is reproduced in its entirety, unchanged except for normalizing the spelling for the modern reader.