• A federal judge won’t let the Veterans Administration wriggle out of the lawsuit over grave markers for Wiccan veterans.
• The Guardian, a British newspaper, covers the Greek Pagan renaissance.
For years, Orthodox clerics believed that they had defeated Greeks wishing to embrace the customs and beliefs of the ancient past. But increasingly the church, a bastion of conservatism and traditionalism, has been confronted by the spectre of polytheists making a comeback in the land of the gods. Last year, Peppa’s group, Ellinais, succeeded in gaining legal recognition as a cultural association in a country where all non-Christian religions, bar Islam and Judaism, are prohibited. As a result of the ruling, which devotees say paves the way for the Greek gods to be worshipped openly, the organisation hopes to win government approval for a temple in Athens where pagan baptisms, marriages and funerals could be performed. Taking the battle to archaeological sites deemed to be “sacred” is also part of an increasingly vociferous campaign.
The article mentions James O’Dell, who also appears in the documentary I Still Worship Zeus.
What happens in Greece first may happen next in the UK or elsewhere in Western Europe. A number of British Pagans have borrowed the rhetoric of American Indian activists about sacred sites and about ancestral remains stored in museums.
• After a couple of years, this blog seems to have been removed from BeliefNet’s “Blog Heaven” site, where it used to appear in the “Other Faiths” category at the very bottom of the page.
No one from BeliefNet informed me that my blog was given the boot; I just happened to notice.
When I asked what was going on, someone named Tim Hayne, editorial project manager, said that it was unintentional and tried to make it look like it was my fault for changing something at this end. (Don’t tech-support people always try to make problems look like the user’s fault?)
Ten days have gone by, but nothing has changed. You won’t find Letter From Hardscrabble Creek in Blog Heaven. (Maybe there is a Blog Limbo somewhere.)
But the URL of my site feed has not changed. So I have to wonder if someone at the supposedly interfaith BeliefNet site just cannot stomach an outspokenly Pagan blog.
It’s their site and they can run it the way that they want. But why can’t they be honest?