Pagan
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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…
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Approaching Pantheacon
So, next week I will go to Pantheacon 2019. I am a volunteer on staff, which is how I am able to afford to go. I always have mixed feelings about going. Part of me is excited to see friends, meet new ones, and share Atheopaganism with others. Part of me is anxious: will people show up for my events? Will I be challenged or heckled? The usual brain chatter, honestly. We all have it. This year, though, I come at Pantheacon at a somewhat different angle. In previous years, I have thought of PCon as “encountering The Pagan Community”. But now I realize that there is no such singular…
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Mainstreaming, Pt. 2
Some weeks ago, I wrote about how Paganism is having a moment in the sun, and mainstream culture is noticing us. If nothing else, take as evidence the eternally fluffy and pop-culturey Huffington Post’s article about encountering Pagans. Seems pretty clear that between sugary media offerings like The Spooky Adventures of Sabrina and the explosion of “witchy aesthetic” material on Tumblr, plus the steep decline of Christianity and rise of “none” or “other” as a religious identity, Paganism has tipped—for the moment, at least—over the edge from obscurity into the public eye. As I wrote before, I think this is a good thing. But there are certainly some considerations for Pagans…
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The State of the Path: Atheopaganism in 2019
Atheopaganism is a particular spiritual/religious path: a subset of both Paganism and atheism. There are other atheistic Pagan paths, so ours isn’t the only one, but our particular path has now existed for ten years and has been steadily growing for five. I thought that for my first post of 2019, I would talk a bit about the current state of the Atheopagan path, and where I think we’re going. The primary theme I can see trending within the Atheopagan path is growth. We are growing in numbers, in visibility, and in recognition. Both in followers of the website and in membership of the AP Facebook group, we continue steadily to add…
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The New Ones
Much has been made in both the popular and Pagan press recently about the “witchcraft fad”. There is lots of witchy imagery in media and popular culture right now, including fashion, television, film and literature. Witchcraft, so they say, is having a moment. And not just in the media, but in reality: self-described witchcraft (which has at least some nexus with what we generally call Paganism) is enjoying a surge of interest. People—particularly Millennial and Generation Z women —are enthusiastically embracing not only a witchy/gothic aesthetic, but practices such as Tarot reading, creation of their own ritual “spells”, and in many cases, Earth-devotional or Goddess-oriented spirituality. The response of established…
