David Ellis Dickerson is a frequent contributor to “This American Life” and his stories tend to revolve around his time as a fundamentalist Christian. I posted about one of them in particular last year.
Now, he’s written a book called The Exy Book: Modern Myths of a Scandalous Goddess — about Xenia, a “skeptical trickster goddess.” She sounds all sorts of awesome:
Xenianism celebrates the spirit and the power of unruly, unladylike, and blasphemous women. Why? Because misbehaving women are always the first target of religious fundamentalists. Therefore (as Xenians teach us) when we save and celebrate unruly women, we save everyone from fundamentalist thinking, and in the process we create a world with more freedom, more creativity, more love for outsiders and misfits, and less dependence on magic and authority.

Even if you think creating “secular mythology” is oxymoronic, it’s a fun character, and this video tells just one of the episodes in her backstory: