Jim was one of my closest colleagues from December 2010 when we met for the first time in Amsterdam at a meeting with Brill staff about the fortunes of the Brill Handbooks of Contemporary Religion series that Jim had established. Before that there had been intermittent e-mails from around 2003 onwards, and I had knocked back a few invitations to contribute chapters over the years. Finally, I agreed to both the Handbook of Contemporary Paganism (2009) and the Handbook of Religion and the Authority of Science (2011) and then it was all systems go. I became co-editor of the Brill Handbooks of Contemporary Religion from January 2011 and the series is now in the capable hands of Ben Zeller and Terhi Utriainen. Jim and I had a long-running gag about badgers going for years; he loved the fact that "to badger" meant to nag, chase up, harry, and many other synonyms. We talked about badgers and raccoons with my late partner Don (born in England, very pro-badger, but after a year living in Canada in the mid-1990s very impressed by the "fuck you" attitude of the raccoons), and in e-mails shared badger stories and poems. I read a short Japanese folktale about Badger spirit transforming himself into a teapot as a reward for a kindly old man. My original choice "The Badger and the Bear" (a Native American story) was too long to read. You can follow up all things badger-related, and think warmly of Jim, on the wonderful Badgerland website: http://www.badgerland.co.uk/education/stories/thebadgerandthebear.html
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James R. Lewis
Memorial website
Department of Religious Studies, Wuhan University, China
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