Category: Christianity
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Humbled by the Darkness of Winter
I started out this December with a nose dive into Christmas cheer. Then, I spent some time exploring what parts of the Christian holiday were still resonant with me, and what I’d happily left behind. Now, the introspection of the Dark Days has set in. It hit me unexpectedly. One moment I was working my […]
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A Pagan Reclaiming Forgiveness
In the midst of this Christian extravaganza, standing beneath the red and green blinking lights, and surrounded by the sound of Jesus followers singing hymns and secular Christmas classics, I’m rediscovering the act of forgiveness. I didn’t expect forgiveness to be a theme of this brief caroling experience. I thought my time singing Christmas songs […]
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A Pagan’s Christmas Message
I’m in Nashville, home of the Christian Contemporary Music Industry, home of LifeWay Christian Stores, and home of the Southern Baptist Convention. This week, in a kind of radical re-immersion into Christian culture, I’m going to spread the message about Jesus to Jesus-people, and I’m doing so in the most subversively effective way imaginable: through catchy […]
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On the Nature of Salvation for Pagans
The conversation born out of my last post has been, by far, one of the most stimulating dialogues to take place on Bishop In The Grove. My mind is a flurry with thoughts of Gods and Goddesses, mysticism, my own need for a deeper and more engaging practice, and — for the first time in […]
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On Converting a Christian to Paganism
I’m a convert to Paganism. I was born into a Christian tradition, and spent most of the first 25 years of my life identifying as a Christian. I’ve written of this before, but the subject keeps coming up for me. There’s something about how we arrive at our tradition that seems worth reflecting on, especially […]
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More On Christian-Pagan Relations
Pagans hate generalizations made about Pagans (he writes with a smirk). That’s one generalization I feel confident in making. In my last post I made some bold statements about the unwillingness of Pagans to accept the existence of the Christian god, knowing full well that those statements were not completely accurate (or, perhaps even close […]
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Christian-Pagan Couples Counseling
Pagans don’t want to accept the possibility that the Christian god is real. Doing so might open us up to a diatribe about salvation, our inherent sinfulness, or our “need for conversion”. We’ve had that talk a time or two, and – thank you – we’ll pass. Christians are of the “One and Only God” camp. Not […]
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The Christo-Pagan Conflict
Christianity and Paganism: are the two mutually exclusive? The subject came up after the Full Moon ritual, and it got a little heated.
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How I Arrived At Pagan
I’m writing to explain my relationship with the identifier, Pagan, and how it sometimes fits and often does not fit my sense of religious identity.