Reading Time: 4 minutes I like to say I’m not one for ritual, but I fall into seasons of celebration and reflection as much as the next person. I also understand folks who, having grown up with religion, long for secular equivalents to cherished childhood traditions. One of the five pillars of Islam is Zakat, charity from those who […]
Ritual
Posted inPinn Drop with Anthony Pinn
Small creatures and deep connections | Sasha Sagan
Anthony Pinn kicks off his new podcast with Sasha Sagan, author of For Small Creatures Such as We: Rituals for Finding Meaning in Our Unlikely World. Daughter of astronomer/educator Carl Sagan and writer/producer Ann Druyan, Sasha was raised with a sense of awe and wonder about the majesty of the universe, learning to see science […]
Posted inCulture
Tracing the sacred origins of wine
Reading Time: 3 minutes OnlySky · Tracing the sacred origins of wine | Becky Garrison While many in the Western world might associate the sacred origins of wine with Christian and Jewish rituals, the actual history of wine and biodynamic wine in particular can be traced to Persia. Here, a Persian folktale illuminates wine’s mythical origins: When a lady […]
Posted inLGBTQ
House of Our Queer: Community organizing for the queer spirit
Reading Time: 6 minutes For too long, spiritual wellness and religious communities have been largely run by institutional leaders who center white, cisgender, heterosexual, monogamous people. Because of this, many LGBTQ+ people like me have experienced pain from our religious backgrounds or have felt cut off from a spiritual or faith-based practice. This is a problem because spirituality—rooted in […]
Posted inReligious News
This child had all her hair plucked out in a disturbing Jain ritual
Reading Time: 4 minutes In a truly disturbing video circulating online, an eight-year-old girl from India is seen having her hair ripped off, clump by clump, strand by strand, as a way to prove she’s indifferent to pain. It’s part of a Jain religious ritual that marks her entry into the priesthood. I repeat: She’s eight and entering the […]
Posted inDeep Dive
The Allentown ‘Black Mass’ of 1985
Reading Time: 4 minutes When The Satanic Temple (TST) brought its first annual SatanCon to Scottsdale, Arizona last week, many detractors said they were going to perform a black mass and (through whatever supernatural mechanism) bring harm to the city. Black masses aren’t really a thing People have been doing Satanic rituals like the ones done by TST and […]
Posted inReligious News
On Catholicism, magic words, and double standards
Reading Time: 6 minutes For the religious, baptisms are important. They are, for most Christians, the door to church membership and entering into a covenant with Christ, an invocation of unity, and a symbolic cleansing. In fact, Catholics believe it cleanses the subject of original sin. Get in there early, or sin could take hold. And to focus on […]
Posted inCulture
Yahoo boys, money rituals, and the magic of desperation
Reading Time: 6 minutes Yahoo boys, babalawos, money rituals. If these terms don’t already mean anything to you, brace yourself—we’re venturing into hard territory. Nigeria is a West African country with two-thirds of the US population packed into less than a tenth of the territory. And there, in recent months, a perennial cycle of violent rituals thought to bring […]
Posted inBooks, The Secular
Not Seeing God through Celebrations in Life
Reading Time: 4 minutes Galen Broaddus, of Across Rivers Wide, here at Patheos, contributed a chapter to the recent book Not Seeing God: Atheism in the 21st Century. In his piece, he alludes to the human proclivity for ritual and celebration. As a humanist celebrant, he is tapping into this and supplying the demand for such within an atheistic paradigm. Part […]
Posted inGeneral, Myth & Folklore
#FolkloreThursday: Customary Folklore
Reading Time: 4 minutes When folklore crosses into the realm of religion, ritual, festival, and holiday, we consider it customary folklore: cultural materials people learn traditionally.