If you’re in the DFW area, come out to this Saturday’s Pagan Pride Day at the UU Church of Oak Cliff.  It runs from 10 AM to 10 PM.   At 1:30 I’ll be leading a workshop on Daily Spiritual Practice for Pagans. Our North Texas Pagan Pride Day 2010Will be held at…Unitarian Universalist Church of Oak Cliffhttp://www.oakcliffuu.com/3839 W. Kiest in SW DallasSaturday, September 11th10am to 10pmGet Directions .  Read more

stock photo of Hawk in flight from Wikimedia Commons. After two and a half weeks of relative calm, my paying job turned nasty again on Friday – yet another case of insufficient resources to meet the expectations which weren’t communicated clearly to begin with.  Nothing I can’t work through, but it really threw me and it’s taken a day and a half to get myself righted (which in itself is an improvement – in past years it’s taken far longer).... Read more

Here are links to four versions of the same story about an archeological dig at a 12,000 year old site in Israel: from TIME Magazine, US News & World Report (which appears to be republishing Science Magazine), the Christian Science Monitor, and the BBC. The site is significant because it gives us a picture of the transitionary period from hunter-gatherers who followed wild herds to farmers who raised crops and tended domesticated herds in fixed locations – the beginnings of... Read more

Here’s a link to the Photography Blog of the Dallas Morning News, where the photo editor asks if pictures of the dead from open-casket funerals should be published. Two pictures are included: a close-up of the mother kissing her dead son, and a longer, wider shot with the casket slightly out of focus. The editor says newspapers are reluctant to run such photos. The deceased is Army Spc. Pedro A. Millet Meletiche, who was killed in combat in Afghanistan on... Read more

Sunset over Chickamauga Lake in Tennessee This will be the first in an occasional series on spiritual practice techniques. It’s flowing out of the spiritual practice workshop I led at this year’s Druid Gorsedd and the Intermediate Pagan Practice class Cynthia and I led this past weekend. I’ll be repeating the workshop at the DFW Pagan Pride Day on September 11. I used to be a runner. Injuries and weight gain (a chicken-or-egg thing) forced me to stop several years... Read more

I like reading Al Mohler’s blog, though I rarely agree with his opinions. Mohler is President of Southern Theological Seminary and one of the leading intellectuals in the fundamentalist Southern Baptist Convention. His writings are straightforward and well-reasoned, and he rarely engages in the name-calling and other identity-based emotional bluster we see from so many fundamentalists. He is clearly a very intelligent, very well-educated person. So how can someone so smart be a fundamentalist? The answer can be found in... Read more

Eight of Cups from the Robin Wood Tarot I know this place,I’ve been here before. I always loved the forest, andit was right outside my back door.But times were hard andI would wander in and out,never truly seeing what I saw,afraid to stray from the straight and narrow,and besides, the path of concrete and steellooked so enticing, so real. But the forest was always there,and if I looked closely enough,quietly enough,I could see movement in the trees. In the land... Read more

In the comments to last Sunday’s sermon, Peter accuses me of “magical thinking.” This is a term we hear frequently in the mainstream world, usually in response to something we don’t think is possible. Politicians engage in it all the time, telling us the federal budget will be balanced in ten years so we don’t need to raise taxes or cut spending. I hear it in workplace settings, where twenty people laid off in one location are replaced by three... Read more

The religion website Patheos has an interview with Galina Krasskova, who calls herself a “free range tribalist Heathen.” The interview is titled “Heathen Piety” and it presents some good insight into contemporary Heathenism, a tradition with which I have very little first-hand knowledge. Krasskova describes herself as a “god-slave” – she does not merely follow Odin or honor him or serve him, she is “owned” by him. I’ve been a UU for a good while now – I’m a strong... Read more

by John BeckettDenton Unitarian Universalist FellowshipAugust 15, 2010 Introduction – the dilemma of the New Atheists We Unitarian Universalists like to say “we don’t have to think alike to love alike.” Nowhere is our commitment to that ideal more challenged than in the question of God. Is there a God, a Goddess, many goddesses and gods? Some of us say yes, some of us say no, and some of us think that since we can’t be certain we’re wasting our... Read more