Irrational Paganism?

The Powers of Darkness, Wild Enough and Free

What Do You Really Want? -- Magic and the Collective Subconscious

On Grief and Connection: A Response to the Fort Hood Deaths
A Guest Post by Ali, of Meadowsweet & Myrrh Jeff’s last post illustrated very well the kind of divisive rhetoric utilized in most political speeches these days, language that takes for gr

Obama’s Best Speech Never: What the President Should Have Said
OBAMA’S BEST SPEECH NEVER Obama’s speech at Ft. Hood, honoring the dead in the recent shooting, is being hailed as a masterpiece of rhetoric.  Marc Ambinder at the Atlantic (http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/11/the_best_speech_obamas_given_since_the_inaguruation.php) says: (blockquote) “I guarantee: they’ll be teaching this one in rhetoric classes. It was that good. My gloss won’t do it justice. Yes, I’m having a Chris Matthews-chill-running-up-my-leg moment, but sometimes, the man, the moment and the words come together and meet the challenge. Obama had to lead a nation’s grieving; he had to try and address

Selling Salvation V: An Economy of Spirit
In my last post, I suggested that philanthropism — giving away goods, services, and knowledge, rather than selling them — was a more ethical choice, and one which could be viable even in the modern capitalist world economy.  Many thriving organizations — charities, non-profits, and open-source organizations — give away their work for free, subsisting only on donations of money and labor.  And plenty of small, tribe-sized economies have existed without money or trade in the past.  But could the whole modern world really run this way? For the Love of the Work Ultimately there would be no reason to have money in such a society. If y

Selling Salvation IV: Philanthropism
Why? In brief, when you buy or sell something, you’re saying, “You’re worth $X to me.”  This demeans it.  You’ve bleached out its essential uniqueness and inherent absolute worth, and given it a value on a dollar scale.  In unfettered capitalism, EVERYTHING is placed on a dollar scale, everthing becomes a commodity, and everything — including sex, work, life, and salvation — is valued only in the marketplace. But the other extreme — living without trade — presents problems for daily living, because the exchange of goods is the foundation of the modern economy.  While capitalism is far from perfect, it has some serious moral and pract

The Myth of Modern Mythlessness
I don’t usually have posts that do nothing but link elsewhere, but I couldn’t resist pointing you over to Ali’s latest, The Group of Twenty and the Mythology of the Market. Ali’s thesis is that myths are not just stories that our ancestors believed back when the human race was young and full of childlike innocence, but are alive and well today.  We don’t recognize them as myths because we think they’re true, and everyone knows that myths are false. Right?… But if you step back and take a serious look, yo