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Take a Moment: A Meditation
As I begin this blog post, I am sitting in bed, sipping coffee. It is early morning. A series of waves of Canada geese are going overhead. I can’t see them, but I can hear them crying into the sky as they make their way onward. I think of Mary Oliver, of course, and remember that I do not have to be good. That here on Earth, there is a place for me in the family of things. As that youthful sage (and paragon of white privilege, to be honest), Ferris Bueller, would tell us: life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in awhile, you…
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Welcome Home
I’ve written on this subject before, but I want to say to the hundreds who have joined our Atheopagan online community since: welcome home! Welcome to a place where deep spirituality of Nature meets reason and critical thinking. To wild, naked dancing around a bonfire (real or imagined), and the wonders of science’s understanding of our Sacred Earth and Cosmos. To ritual, and meditation, and cognition and analysis and art and music, and the fullness of what we can be, we humans. It happens every week, online. It happens every year, in person at Pantheacon. People—strangers, yet family—come to me and say, I had no idea. I thought I was alone. I…
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Burgeoning
It’s definite now: the light is stronger, the days are longer. Here in the northern hemisphere, winter is passing, and spring is coming on. Where I live, in coastal Northern California, the very first wildflowers are the milk maids, and they are already gone now, faded to buttercups and hounds’ tongues and shooting stars: the survivals of what once was a landscape carpeted with flowers in the spring. European grasses have forcibly taken over our hills, but the native flowers yet persist. And the introduced species, the narcissus and daffodils and acacia; they, too, are daubing the green carpet of the winter hills with gold and white. They speak of…
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Reflections on Pantheacon 2019
I have just returned from Pantheacon, where I work as a volunteer staffer and have made presentations on Atheopaganism every year since 2015. I had a lovely time connecting with friends, making new ones, and meeting folks I’d only known before through the Atheopaganism Facebook group. Pantheacon 2019 was significantly smaller than in previous years, but it still had 1,800 attendees. That’s still the largest indoor gathering of Pagans in North America. It ran very smoothly, from my perspective working in the reception room for the presenters. Very few crises or miscommunications. And I received exceedingly generous words of praise and thanks, for which I am humbly grateful. A priestess…
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FACING FORWARD: A talk on nontheist Paganism
This talk was originally delivered at Pantheacon 2019. Let’s start with a question: what’s happening with religion today? It’s an amazing time to be involved with religion, because in the developed world, the Abrahamic religions are collapsing. As philosopher of religion Eric Steinhart says, this may be the most exciting time to be studying religion in two thousand years. According to the Pew Research Center in 2014, fully 24% of Americans now identify as “nones”–having no religious identity. Some of these still describe themselves as “spiritual”, but they do not identify as a part of any religious movement or sect. Nones are the fastest growing religious sector in the country,…
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Abuse, the Pagan Community, and Our Commitments
Sarah Anne Lawless, who published these two revelatory articles on her experiences of being sexually harassed and abused within the Pagan community (mostly in Canada and the Pacific Northwest), has now published a third piece. In it, she reports the truly horrifying blowback she received for daring to name this problem. Lawless has suffered financially, psychologically, and even legally simply because she had the unmitigated gall not to remain silent about abuses up to and including rape.* I wrote on this subject awhile back. It’s one of my most-read articles from this site, and engendered passionate arguments both pro and con my thesis: that Paganism must root out the baked-in…
