Recently, I have experienced some severe life challenges. A period of disability followed by a one of unemployment drained my savings away. I finally landed a good job with a great organization…only to be told, one paycheck in, by my landlord of 18 years that my beautiful home has been sold…
A Sticky, Sweaty, Complicated Mess (That Nearly Everyone Wants)
We were up long before the day-o To welcome in the summer, to welcome in the May-o For sumer is icumen in, and winter’s gone away-o! May Day has just passed, which many Pagans know as Beltane, the festival of young adulthood, love, and sexuality. Time for rising…
Atheopaganism and the Broader Pagan Community
It’s never going to be a completely comfortable fit. Just as the suggestion of religious ritual and other symbolic, poetic, metaphorical practices will always be dismissed by some in the atheist community, Atheopaganism is always going to be viewed by some in the Pagan community as not rightfully belonging. Let me stop…
A Subtle Art, the Medium of Which is Emotion
She was lifting the curtain, looking down from the window in her Civil War blouse, jacket and hoop skirt. Outside, a wagon bearing a flag-draped casket was drawn forward by black horses, flanked with erect soldiers. Suddenly, it was 1865. I was 6, and touring the Custis-Lee Mansion at Arlington National Cemetery with my…
“But I’m Lonely!” Finding Fellow Atheopagans
Atheopaganism is a new religious path. The essay in which I laid out its principles is only five years old, and it has been visible on the web for only a year. This inevitably means that practitioners seeking to find people to circle with are going to be a little…
Atheopaganism and the Mystical Experience
It was night, nearly pitch black, and I had no idea how many steps extended before me, down into the darkness. Down to the Underworld. I was in a cave in Pinnacles National Park (then Monument) in California. And I was in Greece some 2,500 years ago. I was a…