I love punk rock. I was in high school at exactly the period that disco became a popular genre (which means that it was already dying in the gay bars and minority clubs where it had been born; by the time straight white people took it—because there was money to…
A week or so ago, when I published “Is Atheopaganism Political?“, I expected some pushback. I suspected that there might be some who have embraced—even subconsciously—the dualistic idea that religion/spirituality lives in a separate realm of human experience from that of pragmatic matters such as public policy. So…
People’s relationships with the world of public policy, elections and world affairs vary widely. For some, they are background noise, irrelevant distractions to the matters of their own lives, beliefs and practices. There are many Pagans like this. While they may espouse political opinions or share memes on Facebook, they’re…
This time of year, the chorus of crickets is a nightly affair. It’s evocative. It speaks of every summer evening there ever was. As it turns out, there is more to cricket’s song than the equivalent of “Hey, baby!” in High Cricket. Think about the speed at which a cricket…
Ritual tools are personal things. They are objects that we find evocative, meaningful, symbolic. They whisper stories to us, and those stories are folded into the meaning of the rituals which we perform with them. Atheopagans vary widely in the kinds of ritual tools they use, including those who don’t…
There’s been some discussion of the concept of “sin” in the Pagan blogosphere lately: here, and here, and my own contribution some time ago, here. Now, I should say: that’s a freighted word for many people, but not so much for…
