I love a good conspiracy theory, especially when it involves what I always thought was one of the most innocuous of fraternal orders. You will find a calmer discussion here.
Tag Archives: American religion
Smokey and the Sacred
My paper “Smokey and the Sacred: Nature Religion, Civil Religion, and American Paganism” has been accepted for a special issue of the journal Ecotheology, edited by Graham Harvey.
The publishing agreement, however, forbids me from publishing more than the abstract online. (But maybe if you ask nicely.) I will supply a complete bibliographic citation to the printed copy as soon as it is available.
Maybe it’s the first Pagan Studies paper to invoke Smokey Bear as a godform, following the footsteps of Gary Snyder’s “Smokey the Bear Sutra.”
OK, so he is somewhat discredited as a forester in these “prescribed burn” days. Sometimes demigods have a come-down.
Eighties flashback
Maybe if more people knew that the Freemasons had sex slaves , their membership would not be declining!
‘Sacred’ but not ‘Religious’
A school teacher in my former home of Cañon City, Colorado, is in trouble with a cowboy-hatted pastor (his photo not on the web version) over alleged ‘pagan’ practices at the school. See how she employs the language of public-education casuistry.
African Religions Attracting Americans
This is not really new news, but the growth of religions of the African diaspora attracted the attention of this reporter.
From what I hear elsewhere, it is actually the new converts–not all of them necessarily of African descent–who are most insistent about purging Voudoun, etc., of syncretized Christian elements in order to make them purely Pagan.
A quiz on civil religion
Quiz: The removal of bronze plaques bearing Bible verses from the South Rim of the Grand Canyon is a defeat for Christian hegemony and a victory for
A. Secular humanism
B. Covert federally supported nature religion
C. The American Civil Liberties Union
D. Fundamentalist fundraisers
E. All of the above
F. None of the above
Sacred Ground
Rediscovering America’s Sacred Ground, subtitled “Public religion and the pursuit of good,” will be on my reading list as soon as SUNY Press releases it. The author is Pagan scholar Barbara McGraw, who “examines the debate about the role of religion in American public life and unravels the confounded rhetoric on all sides. She reveals that no group has been standing on proper ground and that all sides have misused terminology (religion/secular), dichotomies (public/private), and concepts (separation of church and state) in ways that have little relevance to the original intentions of the Founders.”