On Wednesday evening I attended a lecture by Dr. Paul Clark, Steward of the Fraternity of the Hidden Light. It was titled “Initiation and Archetype in the Western Mysteries.” The best general online introduction to the Western Mystery Tradition is probably the Wikipedia page, although the subject is so broad and (if you’ll pardon the phrase) shrouded in mystery you could follow hyperlinks all day and still not have a definitive definition in your head. Here’s my rough attempt at... Read more

Steve Jobs died yesterday at the age of 56. Tributes, biographies and features are filling the internet and I have nothing noteworthy to add to them. Instead, I want to talk briefly about how we (most of us, anyway) viewed Steve Jobs, what that says about us and what we can learn from it all. Disclaimer: I’m not an Apple fanatic. I don’t dislike the company or its products, I’ve just never thought they were worth the price premium over... Read more

I’m still thinking about Sharon Knight’s call to “re-enchant the world.” On Saturday I talked about some of the ways we can do this: through the arts, in Nature, and through our own magical work. But how do we create an enchanted world when the disenchanted world keeps intruding? And even if we can, what right do we have to live in a magical world when so many people are living in a world where it’s a struggle just to... Read more

Although we had a lot of rain at the OBOD East Coast Gathering, Saturday night turned out very nice.  We had a roaring fire, songs, stories, jokes… and this performance by Alexis Hosea from New York.  It turned out surprisingly well for something shot by a rank amateur with a point & shoot camera. Enjoy… Read more

Sharon Knight is the lead singer of Pandemonaeon and a Pagan in the Anderson Feri Tradition. Last week she wrote a piece for her blog titled “To Re-enchant The World” where she said To re-enchant the world implies that it has been disenchanted. The concept of disenchantment appears to have been coined by a turn-of-the-century German Sociologist named Max Weber, to express the loss of mystical, magickal, or religious worldviews in favor of purely scientific, mechanistic, and capitalistic worldviews. While... Read more

crossposted with No Unsacred Place Every now and then we need to immerse ourselves in Nature. The idea of living in cities – much less in suburbs – is a very new phenomenon. Even after cities became commonplace – when “civilization” began – the majority of people still lived on the land. It wasn’t until 1920 that more people in the United States lived in urban areas than in rural ones. By 1990 75% of Americans lived in cities or... Read more

I’m back from a wet but wonderful long weekend at the OBOD East Coast Gathering in Pennsylvania. We had rain, an Alban Elfed (Autumn Equinox) ritual, rain, Druid grade initiations, rain, Bardic grade initiations, rain, workshops by OBOD Modron Thea Worthington and Touchstone Editor Penny Billington, rain, workshops by various other participants (I led the Daily Spiritual Practice workshop), rain, good food, rain, mead, and rain. Did I mention that it rained all day Friday? It’s been so dry in... Read more

The death penalty is in the news again. The national and international attention is on Troy Davis, set to die tonight in Georgia for a murder of a police officer in 1989, even though seven of nine witnesses against him have recanted their testimony and the physical evidence is questionable. Texas (the capital punishment capital of the Western world) has just executed one of the men involved in the racially-motivated dragging death of James Byrd. And another convicted killer received... Read more

Star Foster at Patheos has a new piece up on Ephesus, which is best known in the West as an early Christian site but which was known in antiquity for its massive Temple of Artemis, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The history in Star’s article is good but what grabbed my attention was this musing on the religious implications of a people who built and rebuilt a grand temple, until they stopped. the creation of devotional objects... Read more

My biggest criticism of the “spiritual but not religious” crowd is that too many of them use the label as an excuse for avoiding the hard work of spiritual practice and the accountability of religious community. But that criticism raises the question “how much is enough?” How much spiritual practice is enough? How much study is enough? How much social action is enough? How much witness is enough? How much worship is enough? In the small Baptist church where I... Read more