Reviews and recommendations of sources.
Say you are me (sorry about that) and you are minding your own business online, just trying to survive in a world of unrelenting horror when suddenly…
You are not, in fact, the granddaughter of the witches they couldn’t burn
A post on learning to spin flax, which I’ll probably need for reference this fall as I finally level up from wool.
At the time, I did not realize it but I had established a community altar to Minerva. (For over a year, I have continued to maintain it.) It all …
A Community Altar to Minerva
An excellent story of one of the myriad small ways we can bring our faiths into our communities!
I hope that my acquaintances and readership, such as it is, on this blog are aware of the fact that there’s a whole heap of pseudoscience and conspiracy in the world that creeps into pagan spaces. I would hope also that we’re all relatively inclined toward avoiding spreading around bullshit.
In that vein, I’d like to direct you toward this YouTube channel from a bright young man with far more energy than I for such things. In his “Awful Archaeology” series, Milo spends a lot of time unpacking the evidence and science that exists around various New Age theories and teaching about historic sites with a little snark and much enthusiasm. When called for, such as during interviews he hosts with academics in the field, he can be quite professional as well. Famous topics on which he gives good insight: the Dendera “lightbulb” image, the Bagdhad “battery”, Goebekli Tepe’s unknown use, and, of course, he is currently working on a series to unpack the claims made in Graham Hancock’s “Ancient Apocolypse” Netflix series.
I promised to give my hot takes on a handful of books, and I’m going to deliver, albeit in short form because I’ve got other things I’d prefer to be doing. Below the cut, my thoughts on: Consorting with Spirits by Jason Miller, Calling to Our Ancestors by Sarenth Odinsson, Heart on Fire by Galina Krasskova, and The Love of Destiny by Dan McCoy
Read moreWhen I started this project I wondered to myself whether there were active polytheistic monstics out there in the wider world– monasticism’s nature, being a vocation that generally takes a person out of the world, can make it quite hard to find monastics online. But this year Janet Muninn released a collection of essays she edited, Polytheistic Monasticism, wherein monastics discuss their experiences. What luck!
I have to give it to Gus DiZerega: he can title a book well. God is Dead, Long Live the Gods was pretty compelling when it came up in the “Recommendations” list on my GoodReads. I anticipated, as the book’s tagline promises, “a case for polytheism”, a series of arguments designed to persuade the reader toward polytheistic worldviews, showing how polytheism is somehow “better” at building a functional society and relationship with the Earth. While I don’t need any persuading on the faith front, and I don’t believe polytheism is superior as a general rule, I was interested to see what Mr. DiZerega had to say.
That’s about the end of the nice things I have to share about this book.
To start, structurally I find nothing enjoyable here. The entire thing is written as if the author took a high school 5-paragraph expository essay’s guidelines far too seriously while simultaneously ignoring them. Very seldom are individual concepts and cited sources connected using thoughtful transitions and synthesis of the author’s own ideas and argument. Yet, he made damn sure to get an academic citation into almost every single paragraph of the book. It reads a bit like being browbeaten by your 15-year-old cousin who’s just discovered Reddit and now believes himself to be a philosopher. It’s shallow and poorly thought out. Based on this alone I can’t recommend reading this book to anyone.
TL;DR: The author of this book does not understand who his audience is, how to write a persuasive argument, or what polytheism is.
Katrina Townsend has written a really important book that explores – based on her own experience – what consumer culture does to a person. She shares her experiences of compulsive shopping, social media addiction and the way all of this eroded her sense of self. Furthermore she does so without falling into the kind of […]
The Anti-Consumerist Druid – a review — Druid Life
Religion, for me, comes with homework.
Below the cut, you can find a list of books, blogs, and articles I’ve found useful thus far in this whole process of Having Religion and my experiences with it. Not all of these are strictly about faith. They’re sorted by author more or less in MLA format.
Note: this is books I’ve found useful, not a complete list of everything I’ve ever read on the subject of religion. That would take far too much time to compile and I’m lazy.
Patron Saint of Hard Times 