There are lots of articles and essays of interest to modern Pagans out there, sometimes more than I can write about in-depth in any given week. So The Wild Hunt must unleash the hounds in order to round them all up.
- Artist Lauren Raine is holding a Kickstarter campaign to create 21 new pieces in her Masks of the Goddess series. Previous collections in this series have been used by several Pagan groups for ritual purposes, most notably Reclaiming. The new collection will be held in trust for future community use. The money raised will also fund the “inaugural performance” of the new collection at the 2012 Women and Mythology Conference in San Francisco, produced and directed by M. Macha NightMare.
- Cherry Hill Seminary is holding a fundraiser centered around Hypatia day (March 15th), encouraging groups to hold screening of the film “Agora,” followed by dessert and discussion. Attendees at these events will then be encouraged to join The Hypatia Society, the fundraising arm of CHS. If you’d like to sign up for this, you can do so here.
- Damien Walter, writing for The Guardian, ponders the questions of why English culture is “bewitched by magic.” His theory? That magic(k), with its “symbols and theatricality of the occult” contain metaphors to understand the “science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will”.
- The Daily Beast looks at the documentary film “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory,” and its road to being a frontrunner for an Academy Award this Sunday. The film documents the trials and tribulations of the “West Memphis 3,” three young men swept up in the Satanic panics of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The West Memphis 3 (Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin and Jesse Misskelley Jr.) were freed from prison in a plea agreement in 2011 after 18 years of incarceration.
- David Briggs, who writes the Ahead of the Trend column for the Association of Religion Data Archives, writes about “nones” (those who claim no religious affiliation) for the Huffington Post. In his piece, Briggs writes that “the struggle for the hearts and minds of many in this diverse group of religiously unaffiliated Americans is far from over.” You can read all of my reporting on “nones,” and how their growth impacts modern Paganism, here.
- The UUA immigration justice blog Cooking Together has been posting on the Doctrine of Discovery, the legal and religious framework for the seizing and conquering of lands held by indigenous peoples. A responsive resolution repudiating the Doctrine of Discovery is on the 2012 General Assembly business agenda. Check out my 2009 interview with activist and Reclaiming Witch Zay Speer, who was at the last Parliament of the World’s Religions, working with the Onondaga Nation to end the Doctrine of Discovery.
- For those looking for coverage of PantheaCon that doesn’t relate to the current debate over Z. Budapest and gender, do check out T. Thorn Coyle’s most recent post on the panels and presentations she attended and participated in (some of which were recorded, and will be highlighted on her podcast), and the most recent posts at the Bay Area bureau of the Pagan Newswire Collective. I also want to highly recommend the latest blog post from P. Sufenas Virius Lupus which does address gender and transgender issues at PantheaCon, but also talks about the broader climate at the event, and has a perspective that I think should be read.
- Conservative Heathen politician Dan Halloran, currently serving on the New York City Council, will be a delegate for Ron Paul in the upcoming New York primaries. If there’s a brokered convention, could we see Halloran hit the national spotlight?
- PNC-Minnesota reports that Jennifer Cutting’s OCEAN Orchestra’s CD Song of Solstice has won “Best Traditional Folk Album” from the Washington Area Music Association. Cutting said she wrote the album as a labor of love for the Pagan community.
- The Religious Studies Project has a podcast interview with Graham Harvey, Reader in Religious Studies at the Open University, and author of “Animism: Respecting the Living World”, on the subject of Animism. (Hat-tip to Chas Clifton.)
That’s it for now! Feel free to discuss any of these links in the comments, some of these I may expand into longer posts as needed.