Myth & Folklore Archives

Forgotten gods: When we buried Summanus’s lightning

by Captain Cassidy

May 29, 2023May 30, 2023

Reading Time: 9 minutes He was at one time a god so widely respected and feared that Romans went to great lengths to escape his power. But by the first century BCE, he had fallen into such obscurity that Ovid could refer to “a shrine dedicated to Summanus, whoever
he is.” What can the followers of other gods learn from his fate?

What the world can teach us about religiosity and the state

Myth & Folklore

What the world can teach us about religiosity at home

by M L Clark

Mar 29, 2023Apr 24, 2023

Reading Time: 8 minutes The man who sells newspapers in my barrio is an Evangelical Christian, and also a deeply angry person living in a lot of pain. He lost his wife to COVID-19, he spent the vast majority of his life barely making ends meet, and he attributes not killing himself to the knowledge that his god will […]

Myth & Folklore

The folklore of tricks and tricksters

by Jeana Jorgensen

Mar 27, 2023May 02, 2023

Reading Time: 4 minutes Ask a folklorist and you’ll get some of the history, but we’ll also go into how pranks and trickster figures in myth and folklore subvert the social order…in some cases just to circle back and uphold it. In other words, it’s complicated. Tricksters have been with us for a long time, populating myths, legends, and […]

Happy St. Brigid's Day! | photo of a stone Celtic cross on a green leafy background

Myth & Folklore

Happy Saint Brigid’s Day!

by Barry Purcell

Feb 01, 2023Feb 01, 2023

Reading Time: 2 minutes In Ireland, the first day of February is the feast day of St. Brigid. We call it Lá Fhéile Bríde. This will also be the name of the new annual public holiday to honor frontline workers. Atheist Ireland has criticized the saintly name of this public holiday. They correctly feel there is enough Catholic Church […]

Myth & Folklore

Marrying the other: What animal marriage in folktales tell us about gender

by Jeana Jorgensen

Jan 16, 2023Jan 16, 2023

Reading Time: 4 minutes Folk tales are filled with stories of humans marrying animals. But the consequences are very different for men and women—a difference that illuminates longstanding attitudes toward gender.

Religion

The Christmas conspiracy

by Andrew Hall

Dec 09, 2022Dec 12, 2022

Reading Time: 3 minutes In this video, Dr. David Kyle Johnson talks about the Christmas conspiracy. While we hear a lot about the War on Christmas, there isn’t much press on how Christians conspired to use the most wonderful time of the year for their own ends. This video is part of a larger conversation we had about his […]

Religion

The Star of Bethlehem, a real event?

by Bob Seidensticker

Dec 06, 2022Dec 06, 2022

Reading Time: 4 minutes What was the Star of Bethlehem—a nova? A planet? A star? A comet? And can any of these explain, “the star … went ahead of [the magi] until it stopped over the place where the child was”?

Myth & Folklore

The first 1000 words written about Jesus

by J. H. McKenna

Nov 14, 2022Nov 17, 2022

Reading Time: 5 minutes Let’s remember what we’re not dealing with, and what we are dealing with, in a gospel writer. Goodbye journalist, biographer, historian. Hello mythologist and fabulist. Mythologists and fabulists have been the most successful storytellers in the history of writing. Their books have been on best seller lists for thousands of years. Some of their writings […]

Critical thinking

From razor blades to fentanyl: What’s not hiding in your kid’s Halloween candy

by Erin Louis

Oct 31, 2022Oct 31, 2022

Reading Time: 3 minutes Growing up in the 80s, one of the most frustrating but mandatory Halloween rituals was dumping out my bag of candy for inspection. Up until I was a teenager, I was strictly forbidden to eat a single piece until my mother searched my candy thoroughly. The reason, my mother said, was so that she could […]