[written Feb. 19, 2012] Okay. So I am at Pantheacon 2012! This is the third day. I haven’t had time to blog yet because there are 6 workshop slots a day (a dozen or more to choose from for each slot) and they run from 9 am to after midnight! They have been a mixture of good and bad. As expected, the attendees a motley crew of old hippies, pierced and tattooed goths, winged fairies, starry-eyed New Agers, corsetted and... Read more
I’ve previously posted about D. H. Lawrence before. I am fascinated by his ideas, especially by his shorter writings. (I am still trying to trudge through Sons and Lovers, which is supposed to be his best novel.) Professor Hutton identified Lawrence as a proto-Pagan in his Triumph of the Moon. But an entire book could be written on Lawrence’s pagan-ness. Let me offer a few examples, starting with his pantheism and animism. I apologize for the long quotes, but they... Read more
This is a variant of a quote attributed to Emma Goldman (“If I can’t dance, I don’t want your revolution!”), and it is also a variant of what my 9 year-old daughter told my wife this past Sunday. My daughter had just gotten chewed out by my wife for taking so long to find her scriptures (Bible and Book of Mormon) and making the family late to church. My wife commented that, if my daughter would read her scriptures daily... Read more
I want to offer this link about Mormon Polygamy on the Ask Mormon Girl blog which is written by Joanna Brooks. Joanna is a hero of mine, ever since I heard her interviewed on NPR by Krista Tippett. She is a voice for openness in discussions of all things Mormon, while still remaining true to peculiarly Mormon vision of spirituality. This post by Joanna is educational about the practice of polygamy in the past and the present (Mormon doctrine still... Read more
I went to the LDS Church again this past Sunday with my wife and kids. I didn’t really want to go this week, but I want to be supportive to my wife and son. This Sunday, I was struck by the number of references to Satan, or “the Adversary” as Mormons frequently say. Satan was discussed in each one of the three meetings. And “he” was not just mentioned; he was described in vivid detail as a real and active... Read more
We’re coming up on our family Midwinter celebration. (We call it “midwinter” because it is the middle of winter, not the beginning of spring here in the Midwest.) Here’s my outline for the upcoming celebration. It includes a ritual burning of a piece of paper on which something is written. I very much dislike how ubiquitous this ritual is in Neopagan practice, but I do use it in this one celebration. The ritual is geared for my non-Pagan wife and... Read more
In my last post, I wrote about Theodore Roszak’s critique of the Age of Affluence and its “treacherous parodies of freedom, joy, and fulfillment.” Roszak’s The Making of a Counterculture was one of the important signposts on my early spiritual path. I first discovered this book in my high school library and it was like the voice of Jeremiah shouting from the walls of Jerusalem. In his book, Roszak described the Sixties counterculture as a reaction and a challenge to... Read more
A few weeks ago, my daughter heard an ad on the radio for an audition to a Disney television show while we were driving to her gymnastics class. She convinced me to call in and we made an appointment for an audition. So last night I took my daughter to the “audition”. Naturally, it turned out yo be a “pre-screening” at a modeling agency which is looking to hook parents with starry-eyed dreams for their kids. My daughter didn’t understand... Read more
I don’t dig the Buddha. I’m really outing myself here, because, if there is one thing that the humanist religious community can agree on, it’s that Buddhism is cool. Even the non-Buddhists think so. It is just not fashionable to dislike Buddhism. Today, in our Spirit Circle discussion group at my UU church, we watched another segment of a documentary on Huston Smith, the eminent religion scholar. This segment was about Buddhism, specifically Tibetan Buddhism. I have since learned that... Read more
So we decided to give the kids bunnies for Christmas. They went to the store to pick them out for themselves and chose two cute dwarf bunnies, one white with brown spots, which my daughter named “Nibbles” (because it bit her right away), and one white with black spots, which my son named “Romeo”. (Romeo as it turns out is not a “Romeo” and remains quite skittish.) Nibbles died ten days later. It turns out that rabbits are very fragile... Read more
The Allergic Pagan
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