There are lots of articles and essays of interest to modern Pagans out there, sometimes more than I can write about in-depth in any given week. So The Wild Hunt must unleash the hounds in order to round them all up.

• If I’m reading this right, it looks like Jessica Orsini, Alderwoman in Centralia, Missouri, and a Hellenic polytheist, isn’t running for reelection in 2012. Quote: “Ward 3 incumbent Jessica Orsini is not a candidate; Landon Magley is the lone candidate for that two-year term.” Orsini is in her third term as an Alderwoman, and one of the few openly transgender and Pagan elected officials. I’d like to thank Orsini for her public service, and wish her well in future endeavors.
• Selena Fox has announced the passing of De-Anna Alba (aka Wendy White), author of “The Cauldron of Change: Myths, Mysteries and Magick of the Goddess,” and a member of Circle Sanctuary in its formative years. May she rest in the arms of the Goddess.
• In his latest column for Patheos, P. Sufenas Virius Lupus discusses the challenges faced by queer-oriented Pagan traditions, and broaches the idea that some form of recruitment might be necessary perpetuate them. Quote:  “If the queer Pagan traditions with which I’m involved are viable, and therefore deserve to be continued in future generations after I’m dead (and even before then, with any luck), how else are those continuities to be made possible without “recruitment”?”
• It seems that the anti-Pagan spiritual warfare-loving New Apostolic Reformation makes up a pretty large chunk of Newt Gingrich’s Faith Coalition. I guess all that “paganism” rhetoric makes a bit more sense now. You can read all of The Wild Hunt’s coverage of this movement, here.
• Looking for more “The Wicker Tree” material after my post yesterday? Check out this video interview with writer-director Robin Hardy, recorded at 15th annual Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal. Meanwhile, the io9 blog calls the new film “thoroughly balls,” which I don’t think is a compliment.
• Over at her The Witching Hour blog, Peg Aloi notes that West Memphis 3 documentary “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory” has been nominated for an Academy Award.
• The Religion News Service reports on Buddhist, Sikh, Jain,Muslim, and Hindu responses to Republican Rick Santorum’s claim that the concept of equality comes only from his God, and is not found in other religions. Quote: “Indian religions predate Abraham, Jacob and all that Rick Santorum was talking about,” said Sulekh Jain of Sugar Land, Texas, chairman of the International School for Jain Studies. “All souls are equal in every way. All feel pain and all feel pleasure. This concept is deeply embedded in the whole philosophy of Jainism.”
• The BBC posts a story on Haitian-Americans finding connection and solace in Vodou. Quote: “Since the quake, voodoo has played an important role in the healing process. Many of these Haitian immigrants have found comfort in the faith and community that voodoo cultivates, practitioners of the religion in the US say.” For more on this, see my January 25th post, “The Solace of Vodou for Haitian-Americans.”
• Covenant of the Goddess points to an obituary for Gardnerian Elder Kevin Cornell (KC) Anton from Veneta, Oregon, who died trying to rescue his dog, swept out to sea. A memorial service is being held February 11th, more information can be found here. May his spirit rest and return to us again.
• LAShTAL points to an unofficial trailer for the in-production movie “Aleister Crowley: Legend of the Beast”, a film that seems to break the mold and actually cast Crowley as a hero/protagonist instead of a villain. Looks like you can add that to the growing number of films created by Pagans and occultists, for Pagans and occultists.

That’s it for now! Feel free to discuss any of these links in the comments, some of these I may expand into longer posts as needed.

Back in March the BBC reported on a study that predicted the extinction of religion in nine countries: Australia, Austria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, New Zealand and Switzerland. The mathematical model used to make this prediction is very similar to one used to predict the extinction of languages. The idea is simple: as the population of religiously non-affiliated individuals grow, their preferences start to become attractive to more and more people.

Pagans dance in "nonreligious" Estonia. Photo: BBC.

“The idea is pretty simple,” said Richard Wiener of the Research Corporation for Science Advancement, and the University of Arizona.”It posits that social groups that have more members are going to be more attractive to join, and it posits that social groups have a social status or utility. [...]  In a large number of modern secular democracies, there’s been a trend that folk are identifying themselves as non-affiliated with religion; in the Netherlands the number was 40%, and the highest we saw was in the Czech Republic, where the number was 60%.” The team then applied their nonlinear dynamics model, adjusting parameters for the relative social and utilitarian merits of membership of the “non-religious” category. They found, in a study published online, that those parameters were similar across all the countries studied, suggesting that similar behaviour drives the mathematics in all of them. And in all the countries, the indications were that religion was headed toward extinction.

This trend isn’t isolated to Europe, a new study by Duke Divinity School professor Mark Chaves, a specialist in the sociology of religion, says that religion in the United States is “softening”.

In “American Religion: Contemporary Trends,” author Mark Chaves argues that over the last generation or so, religious belief in the U.S. has experienced a “softening” that effects everything from whether people go to worship services regularly to whom they marry. Far more people are willing to say they don’t belong to any religious tradition today than in the past, and signs of religious vitality may be camouflaging stagnation or decline. “Reasonable people can disagree over whether the big picture story is one of essential stability or whether it’s one of slow decline,” said Chaves. “Unambiguously, though, there’s no increase.”

Another sociologist, Bradley Wright, notes that “it’s not random who’s leaving churches, as Christians affiliated more through the Republican Party, liberal, marginal churchgoers became offended and left.” At his blog, Wright points out that religion in American society has become increasingly polarized, with the people who find religion only “somewhat” important (you know, the “Christmas and Easter Christians”) a dwindling population.

“The last two years *may* represent a change in the importance of religion. While the most devout religious people (i.e., “extremely important) hold on to their beliefs, there is a significant drop in those who religion as “very” important, with these people appearing to transition to viewing it as only “somewhat” important. It’s too early to tell, however, whether this is a robust long-term trend. If it is, it could portend further polarization—as the middle ground of religious importance disappears.”

Most telling is the opinion of Chaves, who, according to the Associated Press, doesn’t think these trends “can be reversed by ramped-up evangelism or other conscious decisions by religious groups.” Now it should be noted that people with “no religion” aren’t without religious beliefs or ideas, a large number claim to believe in a divine power, and a recent study of the religiously unaffiliated  in the Pacific Northwest showed that many of them had adopted an informal sort of nature worship.

“According to the just-published “Cascadia: the Elusive Utopia.” … a lot of these “nones” in the Pacific Northwest are actually very spiritual, walking a path of their own making, but not into organized religions and churches. Sociology professor Mark Shibley of Southern Oregon University wrote the lead essay called “The Promise and Limits of Secular Spirituality in Cascadia.” “This region is different. The people here are not as connected to religious institutions,” he says. The alternative spirituality here shows itself in two main ways, Shibley notes: “nature spirituality,” such as you see in the secular environmental movement, and the more well-known New Age spirituality, where the gaze is shifted inward.”

So when we are talking about the decline of “religion” in the West, what we really seem to be talking about is a decline in traditional “churched” congregations. These “unchurched” individuals aren’t becoming atheists or religion-free agnostics, but are instead building their own spiritual practices, or turning to decentralized open movements like modern Paganism. Nor is that a trend isolated to the United States, as a recent BBC piece focusing on religion in Estonia, the world’s “least religious” country, will tell you.

“It is one in a chain of events that led the majority of Estonians away from God, but that does not mean they do not believe in anything at all. About 300km from Tallinn I journey to the forest to meet a group of nature lovers – nature worshippers you might call them. “We are pagan,” says Aigar Piho, father of eight children from the village of Rouge in southern Estonia. Sitting on a log in a forest clearing he tells me: “Our god is in nature. You must take time, sit down and listen.” Like many Estonians Aigar is spiritual. He defines his religion as Maausk – a form of Estonian nature spirituality – in which the trees and earth are cherished objects that possess power. Aigar says his place of worship is the forest yet with neither ceremony nor routine nor religious text, it is hard to say it is an organised religion.”

Sounds pretty religious to me! But I would say that, wouldn’t I? In any case, the idea that people who have “lost” religion will turn to Paganism, the New Age, self-constructed spiritualities, and nature-based religions isn’t just wishful thinking on my part, just listen to Bron Taylor, author of “Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future”.

“Where this cognitive shift has been made, traditional religions with their beliefs in non-material divine beings are in decline. The desire for a spiritually meaningful understanding of the cosmos, however, did not wither away, and new forms of spirituality have been filling the cultural niches previously occupied by conventional religions. I argue that the forms I document in Dark Green Religion are much more likely to survive than longstanding religions, which involved beliefs in invisible, non-material beings.”

It should be noted that these trends, while relatively fast-moving on a societal level, aren’t likely to produce massive shifts in power structures or political allegiances in the near future. Pagans, nature-worshipers, and the “spiritual but not religious” demographics will still have to deal with increasingly polarized mainstream religions fearful of a post-Christian future. That said, if you are looking for the hopeful note in all the stories lately about extreme and increasingly reactionary trends among the dominant monotheisms, here’s your light at the end of the tunnel. The promise of a more Pagan tomorrow.

There are lots of articles and essays of interest to modern Pagans out there, sometimes more than I can write about in-depth in any given week. So The Wild Hunt must unleash the hounds in order to round them all up.

• Early reviews of “The Wicker Tree” from its Fantasia 2011 screening are emerging. Fangoria says it “can’t match the impact of its predecessor.” Twitch opines that it “is going seen as horrific and blasphemous to those who saw the original film as an act of horror and blasphemy.” Sound on Sight opines that it is “not only a great genre film, but a film that pushes the boundaries of cinema itself.” All the reviews point out that this is a far more broadly comic film than it’s spiritual predecessor. You can read all of my “Wicker Tree” coverage, here.
• A documentary is being made about writer and conservationist Sigurd F. Olson. According to his biographer, Olson “was an apostle of awe, a witness for wonder, and an icon of the modern wilderness movement whose words will continue to stir hearts and souls for generations to come.” Something for pantheists and Pagan nature-lovers to keep an eye out for.
• The BBC presents “The Ancestors are Calling,” a radio documentary of a South African woman weighing the decision of whether to become a traditional healer and provide “a channel for the power of the ancestral spirits,” or “get on with her life as a young African woman in the 21st Century.”
• A Kickstarter campaign is under way to produce a memorial documentary project about sculptor and art historian Merlin Stone, who passed away earlier this year. Stone was the author of the seminal book “When God Was A Woman.” You can find our more about the project, here.
• Reality Sandwich features and essay by Starhawk about the ongoing effort to produce a film version of her novel “The Fifth Sacred Thing.” With 30 days to go, $44,733 of the $60,000 goal has been pledged. You can find out more at the project’s website.
• The Quietus features an interview with writer and magician Alan Moore. In it Moore talks about his magazine Dodgem Logic and why he’s not on the Internet: “I don’t want to be connected to that kind of all pervasive kind of cyber culture any more than I want to be connected to the physical world more than I can help it.” We all still await the “future release” of his “The Moon and Serpent Bumper Book of Magic.”
• There’s more good news in the ongoing Sacred Paths Center story: PNC-Minnesota reports that Earth House Project has presented Sacred Paths Center with $978.62 in fulfillment of a pledge to donate 25% of the proceeds from their Midsummer Gather. SPC has now raised $9795 towards their goal of $12,000 by July 31st.
• Rick Perry’s ever-controversial “The Response” event continues to make news. Finally questioned about all the controversial endorsers by the press, Perry  said that he appreciates “anyone who’s going to endorse me, whether it’s on The Response, or whether it’s on a potential run for the presidency of the United States,” and that “just because you endorse me doesn’t mean I endorse everything that you say or do.” I don’t think endorsements work that way. You can’t accept all endorsements, but only welcome the parts you agree with. If that were the case Obama and McCain would have simply brushed away their pastor issues in 2008 with no worry. Now we learn that Perry may not even speak at the event he helped create.
• The latest TheoFantastique Podcast features an interview with Erik Davis, author of “Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica”.
• Check out the amazing collection of photos from Life Magazine on Haitian Vodou. The photos are from a June 2011 Haitian Vodou ceremony. Meanwhile, Christian groups continue to wage “Spiritual Warfare” on Vodou, showing just how toothless the new missionary guidelines really are.
• Seattle PI reports on a story involving a doctor, heroin addiction, threats, shamanism, and a substance illegal in the United States. A documentary was made about the shaman arrested, Dimitri “Mobengo” Mugianis.  More about this as I unravel it. Thanks to C. Vermeers for the tip-off.

That’s it for now! Feel free to discuss any of these links in the comments, some of these I may expand into longer posts as needed.

“We will not listen to the things you’ve said to us in the name of YHWH. On the contrary, we will certainly do all that we’ve vowed. We will make offerings to the Queen of Heaven, and pour libations to her as we used to do – we and our ancestors, our kings and princes in the towns of Judah and in the streets of Jerusalem – because then we had plenty of bread and we were satisfied, and suffered no misfortune. But since we ceased making offerings to the Queen of Heaven and pouring libations to her, we have lacked everything and have been consumed by sword and famine. And when we make offerings to the Queen of Heaven and pour libations to her, is it without our husbands’ approval that we make cakes in her likeness and pour libations to her?” – Jeremiah 44:15-19, translation by Graham Harvey, from the Hebrew text of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia, excerpted from “The Paganism Reader”.

I suppose it is somewhat appropriate that I mentioned a Christian sect obsessed with battling the “Queen of Heaven” yesterday, because today I’m looking at a new flurry of press about Her, or as they phrase it, “God’s wife.” The notion that the God of the Jews, and later the Christian God, was once part of a polytheistic landscape is fairly uncontroversial among scholars. Several books have been published on the subject, “The Hebrew Goddess”, “Did God Have a Wife?”,  “Yahweh and the Gods and Goddesses of Canaan”, and “The Early History of God”, among several others. NOVA on PBS even mentioned it back in 2008 for their “The Bible’s Buried Secrets” program. But modern journalism has a short memory, and the story has a new hook via Exeter University’s Francesca Stavrakopoulou, who’s presenting a new BBC production (coincidentally) entitled “The Bible’s Buried Secrets”. Stavrakopoulou and her BBC series have been making the rounds at The Daily Mail (sorry, I still don’t link to them), The Guardian, and The Telegraph.

It’s no secret that we here at The Wild Hunt are big fans of the 1973 cult film The Wicker Man, and are very much looking forward to writer/director Robin Hardy’s recently completed “spiritual sequel” The Wicker Tree; so I was pleased to hear that Hardy screened a 12-minute teaser of the film this Sunday at the Abertoir Horror Festival in Aberystwyth.

Robin Hardy will show a 12-minute promo of The Wicker Tree at the Abertoir Horror Festival in Aberystwyth on Sunday 14 November. The new film features a cameo by Christopher Lee who starred as Lord Summerisle in the original Wicker Man … “I am happy with this film because it is in the same genre as The Wicker Man, although it is not a sequel. There are lots of songs, sex, comedy and something terrible happens when you least expect it.”

Two interesting tidbits from the BBC piece is that Hardy was motived by the (unintentionally, awfully) comedic Nicolas Cage-starring 2006 remake to return to working on a follow-up to The Wicker Man (“That film took the original plot and threw away the rest of what made the original film work.”), and that he’s already at work on the third film in the “Wicker trilogy”.

“Mr Hardy has just finished writing a script for what he describes as ‘the third film in the Wicker trilogy’, The Wrath of the Gods, which he intends to start filming next year.”

The Wicker Tree is due to be released in 2011, but will it draw crowds? The Guardian thinks the original is one of the best horror films of all time, and it still receives generous critical praise, not to mention the ever-renewing cult fanbase, so there should be enough excitement for the film to give it a decent chance at wider success. If so, here’s hoping the 88-year-old Hardy is spry enough to finish the third film! We will, naturally, keep you updated on release dates and other related news items. Now to see if the Daily Mail will rage at the BBC for being too Pagan friendly because it covered this film.

The BBC in the UK, like many news-gathering organizations around the world, spent some time covering modern Pagans during the Halloween/Samhain season. I thought their article by religion correspondent Robert Pigott was pretty standard stuff, meet the Pagans, talk about Samhain, interview Ronald Hutton, mention some recent stories Pagans have appeared in, and wrap it up. But it appears I’m wrong, the article, according to Damian Thompson, a religion reporter and blogging editor for the Telegraph, was an “utterly fawning” exercise in sucking up to Pagans.

“But this potted history of paganism is very heavily sanitised. There’s no mention at all of the overlap between paganism and various forms of Satanism – or the much broader overlap with the far Right. In northern Europe, some pagan movements have celebrated Aryan cultural and racial purity for the best part of a century. In the words of the historian Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, author of a brilliant study of the Neo-Nazi movement entitled Black Sun, Nordic racial paganism or Odinism is a “spiritual rediscovery of the Aryan ancestral gods … intended to embed the white races in a sacred worldview that supports their tribal feeling”, and expressed in “imaginative forms of ritual magic and ceremonial forms of fraternal fellowship”.

Needless to say, the white witches of Weymouth celebrated by the BBC are deeply opposed to this variety of paganism. But over the years there have been ferocious ideological battles between Lefty, feminist pagans and their racially obsessed but equally Green Odinist rivals, and there has been more contact between the two camps than the official representatives of British paganism would care to acknowledge.“

Hours after Thompson, who is also director of the deeply conservative Catholic Herald, lets fly with his threadbare conspiracy theories involving Paganism and baffling BBC-bashing, the Telegraph runs an article seemingly constructed largely from press releases by The Christian Institute and the Christian Legal Centre.

But the decision to give so much air-time to a minority event has raised eyebrows at a time of a 16 per cent cut in the corporation’s budget. It also brought into question how the BBC reacted to more traditional religious events. Andrea Williams, director of the Christian Legal Centre, said: “It’s not always healthy to represent such beliefs as paganism as mainstream, particularly when our national faith is so often pushed to the edges, “It’s vital that our national broadcaster remembers our great Christian heritage and all the precepts that come from it that are good for the nation. I would like to see this more clearly recognised.”

Before you can say “wag the dog” the “controversy” is getting noticed by Gawker, and the Daily Mail, never one to miss out on a good controversy involving Pagans, does a barely adequate re-write of the Telegraph piece.

Andrea Williams, director of the Christian Legal Centre, said: ‘It’s not always healthy to represent such beliefs as paganism as mainstream, particularly when our national faith is so often pushed to the edges. ‘It’s vital that our national broadcaster remembers our great Christian heritage and all the precepts that come from it that are good for the nation. I would like to see this more clearly recognised.’ The decision to allow so much air-time to the minority event in Weymouth, Dorset, was questioned at a time of a 16 per cent cut in the corporation’s budget.

See what I mean? As for the controversy, and the supposed “marginalization” of Christians (you don’t see us complaining about being marginalized during Christmas or Easter), would there even be an uproar if it weren’t for the Telegraph’s own conservative Catholic blogger (who is never mentioned in the later article) and the instantly available pull-quotes from two conservative Christian organizations? It just seems desperately manufactured, an opinion that is only strengthened by the fact that the Telegraph and the Daily Mail (again following the Telegraph’s lead) are both currently (and luridly) covering the story of a diversity handbook given to police officers that includes Pagans.

“The PC’s guide to arresting a witch: It’s normal for people to be naked, bound and blindfolded and whatever you do, don’t touch their book of spells…”

You get the picture. As for the BBC, as spokesperson remarked that “we don’t have anything to say on this.” To which I say: I’m proud of the BBC.

ADDENDUM: BBC editor Kevin Bakhurst responds at greater length to accusations of “neglecting” Christianity.

“It was Halloween. A good chance, we thought, to explore the background to paganism. I would simply suggest that the decision to cover some aspects of paganism on one day indicates an interest in the fact there is in the UK a range of faiths - and among some a lack of faith. Our reporting should be seen in the context of BBC News’s wider coverage of religion and religious events where stories, as ever, are based on topicality and editorial merit. And Christianity - being the country’s main religion - still remains the faith with the most coverage.”

Bakhurst also notes that the BBC got flak for giving too much coverage to the Pope’s recent visit, maybe the Christian critics were too busy reading the Daily Mail to notice that distinct lack of marginalization?

Top Story: While traditional media outlets continue to cut back on their coverage of religion, there’s been a slow expansion on the Internet. Beliefnet, one of the first Internet religion-news hubs, continues to reign supreme in terms of size and traffic, but it’s starting to see some competition from sites like Patheos and the Newsweek/Washington Post-supported On Faith. Now, another new-media contender is entering the God(s)-beat, as the left-leaning Huffington Post launches a religion section.

Site founder Arianna Huffington explains:

“Like all our sections, HuffPost Religion will bring you the latest news — in this case about all things religion-related — served up in the HuffPost style. It will also be home to an open and fearless dialogue about all the ways religion affects both our personal and our public lives. And it will do so in a way that moves beyond the pigeonhole depictions of both the faithful and the agnostic we see so frequently — and also beyond the tired assumption that God is a card-carrying member of one political party or another.

HuffPost Religion is being edited by Paul Raushenbush, an Associate Dean of Religious Life at Princeton University and an ordained Baptist minister. As a passionate and brilliant religious thinker, pastor, writer and college dean, Paul is ideally suited to the challenge of presenting multiple viewpoints and insights, as well as the real-world implications of religion for American life.”

Some of the big-name contributors include Jim Wallis, Deepak Chopra, Sister Joan Chittister, and Eboo Patel. But will HuffPost Religion cover modern Paganism? I’ve received some initial signs from folks working there that they are looking to add Pagan voices to the section, so we’ll see how things play out in the weeks ahead. Patheos, Beliefnet, and On Faith all now include a Pagan perspective (to varying degrees), so I can’t imagine HuffPost Religion will be far behind (especially since they have Pagans writing for them in other sections). I’ll keep you posted on developments.

In Other News:

An Earth-Based Discussion: Thorn Coyle has posted the audio from a panel discussion she led at this year’s Pantheacon on the question: “Earth-Based: Are We Really?”

“Organized by T. Thorn Coyle, this panel features Weiser authors T. Thorn Coyle, Diana Paxson, Zee Budapest, Orion Foxwood, and Lon Milo DuQuette. Discussion spans our definitions of ourselves as Earth- based, Nature-Based, Cosmos-based, etc. and addresses some of the problems of our times as well as positive media influences such as the movie Avatar.”

I briefly covered (and live-tweeted) this panel in my Pantheacon coverage, so I’m glad to see the audio for it released. While the panel didn’t really dig too deep into the question of how “earth-based” modern Pagan traditions really are, there were some fascinating and insightful things said and discussed, and I highly recommend checking it out.

The Fake Child Sacrifices: Earlier this year I noted the story of Ugandan anti-human-sacrifice campaigner Polino Angela, who claimed to have personally killed several children, including his own son. At the time I was deeply skeptical of his claims, seeing them as a strong echo of similar stories peddled by various ex-Satanists and Witches in America. Nor was I the only one to wonder if Angela was fabricating the story, and if he wasn’t, why he wasn’t in custody for his crimes. Now the house of cards has come tumbling down, as he’s been arrested for lying to a public officer.

“He allegedly repeated his claims to a Ugandan police officer and has been charged with “giving false information to a public officer”. He denied the charges and was remanded in custody in Lira Central Prison. Police officer Godwin Tumugumye, an officer at Lira Police Station, said BBC correspondent Tim Whewell is also wanted by the police over the case, reports Uganda’s New Vision newspaper.”

In another report, it’s come out that Angela was paid 200,000 Uganda shillings to play up child sacrifice, and has now confessed to lying.  If only we could do the same to some of the professional “ex”-workers in America. As I said in my initial post on this story, it isn’t that I don’t believe children aren’t being abducted, abused, and killed in several African nations. There’s of plenty of evidence for that. I also acknowledge that some witch-doctors are indeed killing and mutilating certain children for various reasons. But the lurid portrait painted by the BBC, with help from Mr. Angela, raised many of my old “Satanic Panic” red flags (most notably the idea of a centralized sacrifice industry/conspiracy). I’m glad that the truth has come to light in this story.

Max Beauvoir Declares War: After Tuesday’s incident in Haiti, where a mob of Christians drove off a small group of Vodouisants performing a ceremony for the dead, Vodou leader Max Beauvoir says it’s war.

“It will be war, open war,” Max Beauvoir, supreme head of Haitian voodoo, said at his home and temple outside the capital. “It’s unfortunate that at this moment where everybody’s suffering that they have to go to war. But if that is what they need, I think that is what they’ll get.”

You can see a photo essay of the inciting incident, here (thanks to Jennifer for the link). Since the clash of religions, Haitian officials have ensured that Vodou practitioners will be able to perform ceremonies at Cité Soleil in the future, but that seems cold comfort to those who were driven away with stones. However, not everyone in Haiti is seeing a religious war in the future, Mambos Elsie Théanou Joseph and Silviana Désir are busy working to feed and shelter the homeless, while Catholic priest Rev. Frantz-Michel Grandoit sees a new unity developing between Christians and Vodouisants.

“Humanity doesn’t want us to be separated,” said the Rev. Frantz-Michel Grandoit, a Catholic priest. Grandoit has planned several interfaith prayer vigils with Voodoo priests, including a three-day national prayer for rebuilding, held earlier this month and sponsored by the Global Network of Religions for Children, an international nongovernmental organization. In a ceremony at the Croix-des-Bouquets temple earlier this month, priestesses and parishioners knelt at the base of a tree trunk, lighted candles and solemnly chanted prayers for the earthquake’s victims and for the future of their country. “Hold Haiti’s sweet hand!” they sang as they threw water on the tree trunk and conjured up what is known as the Veve, a mystical symbol embodying the Voodoo deities. “Save us! Give us grace and deliverance!”

So while Max Beauvoir is an important voice right now in post-earthquake Haiti, we must remember, despite his claims, that Vodou has no “supreme chief” that all Vodouisants, Mambos, and Houngans bow before. Beauvoir leads a faction, a group of practitioners who have acknowledged him as their leader, and is not a Vodou “pope”. Reporters must move beyond Beauvoir, and talk to many practitioners from different areas to get a fuller picture of religious interactions in Haiti. To be sure there are those how want a religious war, but I would say there are also many who want a sense of national unity to trump theological differences at this critical stage.

The UK Reburial Issue: The BBC tackles the issue of reburying “pagan” remains, and interviews Druid priestess Emma Restall Orr, and representatives from Honouring the Ancient Dead, about the connection some modern Pagans feel to their pre-Christian ancestors.

“Pagan groups are increasingly asking for human remains and grave goods from pre-Christian burials to be returned to the ground, and their voices are being taken increasingly seriously in the museum world.”

As I’ve said before on this site, there is no consensus among British Pagans on this issue, with many, most notably Pagans for Archeology, opposed to the reburial of ancient human remains. It would have been nice for the BBC to get more perspectives on this, rather than simply portraying HAD and Orr as representative of Pagan stances on this issue.

That’s all I have for now, have a great day!