Some time ago, I heard a story on NPR’s “This American Life”, about a guy who lost a friend when the friend found out that he had voted for Obama. The friend had called him a “socialist”. Of course, he didn’t think of himself as a socialist, but was left feeling that he had been called a dirty name, without really knowing why it was dirty. This got me thinking about how the terms we use to define others are... Read more
The Wild Hunt arrived here in Chicago-land region this week. We had one beautiful warm day, and then the wind came and the cold. All the leaves were swept off the trees in one day. Just in time for our family mid-Autumn celebration. Not to mention that the days are getting noticeably darker, a process which will be accelerated by the shift back to Standard Time next Sunday. I love it when the weather actually cooperates with my plans for... Read more
My minister at the Unitarian congregation I attend recently started a sermon series on “Dangerous Words”, which include words like “prayer” and “sin”. That there are considered “dangerous words” says a lot about Unitarianism. Anyway, it got me thinking about what would be considered a “dangerous word” to Pagans. The first one that popped into my mind was “transcendence.” Recently, B.T. Newberg posted a 4-part series of essays about transcendence at the Humanistic Paganism blog, starting with this one: “Three... Read more
I little while ago, I came across this guest post by Molly Remer at Feminism and Religion on theapoetics. Molly blogs at goddesspriestess.com on theaology and theapoetics. Molly describes theapoetics as a three-step process: “Drawing directly from David Miller’s (a student of Hopper) three-fold conception of “theopoiesis,” I offer this similar three-fold understanding of theapoetics: Stepping back—moving away from the classic blinders of Western understandings and theological or intellectual or theoretical constraints and becoming clear and open to the magic... Read more
I have just created a new menu on the side of my blog which contains links to Jung resources. Check it out. Most of these are hard-to-find writings by Jung himself. Jung’s writings, I have come to discover, are very hard to find on the Internet. I also created a reading list of secondary sources for Pagans with an interest in Jung: Americans and the Unconscious by Robert Fuller Jung: A feminist revision by Susan Rowland Jung and the Jungians... Read more
I just came across this quote in a biography of Jung I have been reading. I have struggled previously here and here to explain why I think symbols cannot be reduced to mere metaphors and poetry cannot be reduced to representation language. This quote by Jung, from his essay “Paracelsus as a Spiritual Phenomenon”, captures more or less succinctly what I have been talking about: “One certainly has an understandable desire of unambiguous clarity; but we are apt to forget... Read more
Recently, I discovered a great blog at Witches and Pagans called Baring the Aegis: Hellenismos by Elani Temperance on Greek reconstructionist spirituality. Her full blog can be found here. Two posts in particular caught my attention, both on the practice of libations: “Sponde and khoe; the practice of liquid sacrifices” and “Khernips and libations; two videos on Hellenic ritual”. The videos which Elani made are both beautiful and instructive. I recommend watching them, especially the second one on libations (below).... Read more
I just got back from a trip to Philadelphia for work. I was fortunate to be able to squeeze in a little me-time and I hit three different museums. My first stop was the Franklin Institute, which I cannot recommend, but they had a temporary exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The exhibit ends tomorrow, so I was luck to catch it. Unfortunately we were not allowed to photograph the scrolls themselves. The two photos below came from the website:... Read more
In a recent post, I wrote about polytheistic religious experience from a Jungian perspective. Recently I came across two posts about the ontological nature of feminist monotheistic experience of Goddess, both on the Feminism and Religion community blog. The first was by Molly Remer, entitled “Who is She? The Existence of an Ontological Goddess”. She writes: “To me, Goddess is found in the act of specifically naming that ineffable sense of the sacred that we all, universally, experience or perceive... Read more
Over at The Wild Hunt, Jason Pitzl-Waters has posted about the growth of the UU over the last 10 years, a growth of 15%. This is notable in the face of the general decline of other liberal denominations. When you factor in about 10% population growth, that’s still real, albeit modest, growth. “Apuleius Platonicus” points out in the comments that, in spite of this recent growth, the UU still has not returned to the numbers it had at its height... Read more
The Allergic Pagan
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