Spirit – Gus diZerega

NeoPaganism, Divine Immanence, and the Sacred Feminine

Posted on August 10, 2020December 30, 2020 by Gus

Introduction

This essay analyzes hotly contested issues within the contemporary American Pagan community. The arguments creating such discord rely on holding two contradictory positions at the same time. First, gender is socially, not biologically, defined. The second is there are … Read more

+

The Roots of Religious Nihilism

Posted on June 11, 2020June 11, 2020 by Gus

Medieval theologians wondered about the nature of Divinity as much as anyone. Arguing in opposition to St. Thomas Aquinas’s views that God did what was good because God was good, and so acted reasonably, the scholastic Duns Scotus claimed that … Read more

+

The Hypnosis of Texts

Posted on June 11, 2020June 11, 2020 by Gus

The medium we use for communication influences the nature of what we communicate. Because we communicate through these mediums, we are often unaware of how they shape what it is we communicate.

David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous argued that … Read more

+

Strange Bedfellows: The Christian Right, Radical Islam, and the Hindu Right

Posted on June 1, 2020June 1, 2020 by Gus

Radical Islam easily finds common ground with the religious right on women’s issues. This point ultimately led Dinesh D’Souza to blame American cultural freedoms for the Islamic radicals’ legitimate dislike of us! D’Souza is an important conservative writer, biographer of … Read more

+

Seeing and Feeling Energy Fields

Posted on May 29, 2020May 29, 2020 by Gus

Some otherwise sympathetic readers will suspect my description of Sacred amounts to wishful thinking. The world really is meaningless. Ultimately everything is simply an object in relation to other objects. So it seems to many minds thoroughly socialized by the … Read more

+

Mythos and Time

Posted on May 29, 2020May 29, 2020 by Gus

Mythos and Time

Albert Einstein was asked by a friend “Do you believe that absolutely everything can be expressed scientifically?” Einstein answered “Yes, it would be possible. But it would make no sense. It would be description without meaning – … Read more

+

Looking Deeply: NeoPagans, Domination, and the ‘Woke’

Posted on February 24, 2020April 7, 2020 by Gus

Our community is divided over issues of sex and gender, often to the point of truly poisonous communications directed towards those with other points of view. In a way this division seems strange. Sex is a biological category. Gender is … Read more

+

Power, Evil, and the Crisis of Our Times: an animist view

Posted on January 31, 2020January 11, 2022 by Gus

Gus diZerega

Presented at the Conference on Current Pagan Studies, Jan. 25-6, 2020

Auschwitz guards and staff on holiday.1944

In 2013 I published Faultlines: The 60s, the Culture War, and the Return of the Divine Feminine. Written largely in 2010, … Read more

+

Samhain and Day of the Dead, 2019

Posted on October 14, 2019April 7, 2020 by Gus

With Samhain just around the corner, its relation with Day of the Dead is an issue of some importance to many Pagans. Taos, where I now live, is famous for the ubiquitous presence of decorated Day of the Dead skulls … Read more

+

Critics of natal-women-only rituals oppose NeoPagan religion

Posted on June 28, 2019June 28, 2019 by Gus

One of the more disturbing things about the uproar among some mistakenly calling themselves ‘woke,’ while attacking natal women-only rituals in a Pagan context, is their failure to distinguish between universal human standards and those focused on honoring a particular

+