I can hear the detractors already: “Wicca doesn’t have beliefs!” Well, that’s true and it’s also not. Wicca doesn’t have a single, unified set of beliefs that practitioners are required to adhere to in order to practice. Attempts have been made for a variety of reasons, most of them having to do with codifying the…
The Kingdom of Heaven is in this very moment, properly understood. I don’t remember now whether I heard that in a college religion course or at a sermon one Sunday as a child, but it has stuck with me for decades. I’ve interpreted it in various ways over the years, but I’ve come to understand…
Many years ago, when I was a plucky young religious studies student at a private liberal arts college in Arkansas, I had the privilege of listening to a guest lecture by a traveling Buddhist monk. The monk’s name, I can no longer remember. What I do remember is the overwhelming serenity of his presence and…
For a long time, I thought a coven was a group of people who practiced magick together. It didn’t occur to me until embarrassingly late in my practice – in a coven, mind you! – that there was more to the coven than people getting together a couple of times a month for celebration and…
One of the questions that I am routinely asked is whether or not a practitioner can be called to the service of a deity outside their cultural context. There’s a lot of concern in the Pagan world these days about cultural appropriation and the difference between cultural appropriation and cultural appreciation, and it is an…