If you aren’t listening to the Standing Stone and Garden Gate podcast, you should be. It’s done by Brendan Myers – a Druid and philosopher, and his partner Juniper – a hedgewitch. It is the most intellectually-oriented Pagan podcast I’ve come across. Brendan and Juniper approach Paganism very differently, and the interplay between them is excellent. The most recent Episode 28 is titled “Reasonable Doubt.” I’ll have more to say about doubt in a future blog post, but today I... Read more

Cat Chapin-Bishop, best known (to me, anyway) for her Quaker Pagan blog, also keeps an environmental blog. Her most recent post concerns her efforts to stop generating plastic waste… efforts that have been less than perfect. I feel the same way at times. I do some very good, very responsible things. I also do some things that aren’t particularly helpful. Does that make me a hypocrite? Cat says “Purity is a pretty trivial obsession, in the context of all the... Read more

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen – Hebrews 11:1, KJV I’ve always thought that was a pretty good definition of faith. Perhaps that’s because my father liked to quote that verse and I remember hearing it often… but my father quoted a lot of other scripture I disagreed with both then and now. In any case, it explains that faith is something of substance and is based on evidence. That evidence... Read more

Toomer’s Corner Oaks photo from Jimmy Emerson, used under Creative Commons license One of the reasons I’m a Druid is my love of trees. I grew up with woods literally right outside my back door and I spent countless hours exploring them. Over the years I’ve come to understand that trees are more than just big majestic plants – they’re living, breathing, spiritual beings. If you can sit still and listen you can learn a lot from a tree. And... Read more

The most viewed post in the life of this blog – by an almost 2 to 1 ratio over the second most viewed – is So Mote It Be, a short entry from November 2009. Why, out of all the things I’ve written, is this so popular? The answer, of course, is Google. If you google “so mote it be meaning” this entry comes up on the front page (or at least it does for me). As I recall, when... Read more

The quote for today on my Zen desk calendar comes from Huang-Po, a Chinese Buddhist master who died in 850 CE. “The foolish reject what they see, not what they think; the wise reject what they think, not what they see.” This quote is particularly timely given the last blog entry on presuppositionalism. When we are confronted with evidence that our beliefs are wrong, our first instinct is to deny the evidence. If you repeat something often enough people begin... Read more

I am what the English majors in college called a “barbarian engineer” (we called them “unemployed”). I took two philosophy classes: Introduction to Philosophy and Basic Logic – and that was thirty years ago. I’ve done a considerable amount of reading in the social sciences as part of my religious and spiritual quest over the past ten years, but virtually none of it has been in philosophy. So I’m very much out of my element when it comes to this... Read more

I’m back from a trip to Tennessee for my mother’s 80th birthday. It was a good trip, and I’m particularly thankful we got out of DFW when the weather had airlines canceling flights by the hundreds. In the course of normal catching up with friends and family, I got some news about a guy I went to church with as a kid – we’ll call him Albert, to protect the not-so-innocent. It seems he now has an advancing case of... Read more

Back in December, Chad Clifton had a blog post on Coming to the Edge of the Circle where he used it as an example of a Pagan scholar doing academic work in a Pagan setting. This is not a normal occurrence in academia: there is an unstated assumption that Wicca and other “new religions” aren’t worthy of serious study, and there is an assumption that anyone who practices them will be unable to separate the study of her religion from... Read more

One of the points of division in the recent split in the Feri tradition of witchcraft concerns charging money for teaching, as Jason Pitzl-Waters describes in this very good, very neutral piece on yesterday’s Wild Hunt. The issue of charging for religious services and the larger topic of the role of money in religion can be just as volatile in Pagan circles as it is in more mainstream religions. On one side is the idea that whatever we have learned... Read more