The issue of Sgt. Patrick Stewart’s Wiccan memorial marker “has legs,” as I would have said in my newspaper reporter days.<\/p>\n
Driving to school today, I heard Carl Kasell update the story on NPR’s Morning Edition, and it occurred to me that that was the first time I had heard Wicca mentioned in an NPR newscast, as best I can remember. (I know that I heard it, but I cannot find a link. Hmm…)<\/p>\n
NPR was probably following this Washington Post<\/em> report<\/a>.<\/p>\n There is the usual bureaucratic bafflegab:<\/p>\n Department spokeswoman Josephine Schuda said VA turned down Wiccans in the past because religious groups used to be required to list a headquarters or central authority, which Wicca does not have. But that requirement was eliminated last year, she noted.<\/p>\n “I really have no idea why it has taken so long” for the Wiccan symbol to gain approval, Schuda said.<\/em><\/p>\n His widow, Roberta, is supposed to be meeting this week with some undersecretary-for-something-or-other about the VA’s reluctance to admit the presence of Pagan military personnel.<\/p>\n In 1993, after the first Gulf War, Llewellyn published Circles, Groves, and Sanctuaries<\/em> by Dan and Pauline Campanelli. It’s out of print now, of course, thanks to Llewellyn’s short-press-run philosophy and the federal tax code. You can find it on Advanced Book Exchange<\/a>, though.<\/p>\n It included a photo of a soldier’s Wiccan circle in the desert of Kuwait (as I recall). I reckoned that that might have been one of the first Pagan rituals celebrated in that part of the world in about 1,300 years.<\/p>\n What I wanted to see was an M1 Abrams tank<\/a> nicknamed “Chariot of Ishtar” (painted on the hull in English and cuneiform<\/a>, please) rolling through Baghdad.<\/p>\n Tags: Wicca<\/a>, Paganism<\/a>, Veterans<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The issue of Sgt. Patrick Stewart’s Wiccan memorial marker “has legs,” as I would have said in my newspaper reporter days. Driving to school today, I heard Carl Kasell update the story on NPR’s Morning Edition, and it occurred to me that that was the first time I had heard Wicca mentioned in an NPR […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-686","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6xQTg-b4","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":197,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=197","url_meta":{"origin":686,"position":0},"title":"\"Rebutting\" Wicca I did write\u2026","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"June 2, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"\"Rebutting\" Wicca I did write to National Public Radio reporter Barbara Bradley Hagerty to share my question about why only Wicca, of the various new religious movements covered in her series, deserved to have someone outside its faith community comment on what was wrong with it--in other words, evangelical Christians.\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":115,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=115","url_meta":{"origin":686,"position":1},"title":"Teen Witches","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"February 14, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"Some people are saying that the \"teen witch\" craze, symbolized by the 1996 movie The Craft, has peaked. I don't think so. My latest Llewellyn Publications reviewer's catalog recently arrived, and I saw that Silver Ravenwolf's Teen Witch had been redesigned. Whereas the former cover art had something in common\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"Paganism\"","block_context":{"text":"Paganism","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=paganism"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2004\/02\/teenwitch.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":187,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=187","url_meta":{"origin":686,"position":2},"title":"More Wiccan History","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"May 12, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"\"The Founding Fathers of Wicca,\" a graduate-school paper by Susan Young, currently at the University of Alberta, explores Aleister Crowley's liturgical and other influence on Gardnerian Wicca. It was published in Axis Mundi: A Student Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, whose article index is here. The paper is\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":756,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=756","url_meta":{"origin":686,"position":3},"title":"Where are the ‘advanced Wicca’ books","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"November 1, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"Dianne Sylvan blogged recently on the lack of advanced Wicca books.The problem is partly the lack of a definition, she notes, asking also,How many books have you seen on how to live as a Wiccan when life sucks? How to face life\u2019s worst moments and most difficult challenges? Where are\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6631,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=6631","url_meta":{"origin":686,"position":4},"title":"Passing of Margot Adler\u2014Will NPR Admit She was Wiccan?","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"July 28, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"For those of you not on Facebook, this was the announcement of Margot Adler's passing, posted by her son, Alex. Old friends, long time fans, today at 4am Margot breathed easily for the first time in two weeks. Later today, at 10:30am she was pronounced deceased. Her condition had been\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"American religion\"","block_context":{"text":"American religion","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=american-religion"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":13198,"url":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?p=13198","url_meta":{"origin":686,"position":5},"title":"The First Wiccan Book Published in India","author":"Chas S. Clifton","date":"January 7, 2023","format":false,"excerpt":"A little more than twenty years ago, in the preference to his landmark study of contemporary Pagan Witchcraft, The Triumph of the Moon, the historian Ronald Hutton wrote that \"the unique significance of pagan [sic] witchcraft to history is that it is the only religion which England has even given\u2026","rel":"","context":"In \"India\"","block_context":{"text":"India","link":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/?tag=india"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.chasclifton.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/01\/ANI-20221216115613-300x205.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=686"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/686\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.chasclifton.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}