Pagan values

So, Pax over at Chrysalis called for an international Pagan Values blogging month.  It's a great idea, as our values are something we all want and perhaps need to talk about.  It's better than yet another Wicca 101, or bickering about what colour your candles should be.  And Pax has unleashed a wave of blogposts on our values, some a general overview, others on a specific value or ethic, and yet others arguing about what Paganism is, or whether it is desirable to have a consensus on values.  All interesting stuff.

Pax's excellent series of posts on Pagan Values can be found over at Wordpress.

Here's a few of the contributed posts so far (though oddly, Google Blogsearch appears to ignore Livejournal):

Walking the Hedge » Henceforth, June is Pagan ...

12 hours ago by Juniper   Let us then use our hearts and minds and words, invoking the fires of inspiration; let us write of the virtues and ethics and morals and values we have found in our Pagan paths, let us share how we carry these precious things forward in ... Walking the Hedge - http://walkingthehedge.net/blog/

A Heathen's Day: Pagan Values Month - Heathen Values

9 Jun 2009 by Hrafnkell Haraldsson   Since this is Pagan Values Month, I've tried to put together a post on just that. This is my third post of the day, so apologize for the sudden string (if you're interested, there is below this a petition from MoveOn.org about clean ... A Heathen's Day - http://alheithinn.blogspot.com/ - References [ More results from A Heathen's Day ]

The Watcher: International Pagan Values Month

8 Jun 2009 by Aldrin FT   I almost forgot! I was so caught up with all that shit going around with Colt 45 (which, by the way, is still on air!) that I forgot that June is supposedly International Pagan Values Month (thanks Sannion for the tip). ... The Watcher - http://ahaldrin.blogspot.com/ - References

Same Earth: International Pagan Values Month

8 Jun 2009 by Aldrin FT   Just give me a few minutes to arrange or write something about the positive values of the various "paganisms" around the world (with focus on my own). If not, maybe a few videos or pictures exhibiting ethnic paganism (the type I ... Same Earth - http://sameearth.blogspot.com/ - References

Pagan Values and Who Gets to Pick 'Em

5 Jun 2009 by paganwiccan   At some point, word got passed around the Internet that June 2009 is apparently Blog AboutPagan Values Month. I'm not sure who made the original decision that this is what we're supposed to focus on, but it's been spreading like ... About Paganism / Wiccan - http://paganwiccan.about.com/b/ - References [ More results from About Paganism / Wiccan ]

Putting the “Pagan” in Pagan Values « Chrysalis

7 Jun 2009 by Pax   There is apparently some confusion as to what the Pagan in International Pagan ValuesBlogging month means. I think that that both of the Wikipedia definitions above are a good start. Although I tend to agree with those who dislike the ... Chrysalis - http://chrysalis1witchesjourney.wordpress.com/ [ More results from Chrysalis ]

The Gods Are Bored: Pagan Values Month: Medical Ethics

4 Jun 2009 by Anne Johnson   Anyway, the point of this little entry on Pagan Values Month is that science continues to evolve, and its pace is quickening. Best not to look to one single old book for guidance. Let's debate these thorny issues as they arise. ... The Gods Are Bored - http://godsrbored.blogspot.com/ - References [ More results from The Gods Are Bored ]

Hecate: Pagan Values?

26 May 2009 by Hecate   But if you put a gun to my head, I'd say that most modern Pagans value the Earth, the body, matter, the connection between all-that-is. (As soon as I'd say that, someone could produce half a dozen examples that disprove what I'd said. ... Hecate - http://hecatedemetersdatter.blogspot.com/ - References [ More results from Hecate ]

Property of a Lady » Pagan Values Month: Putting the “poly” in ...

3 Jun 2009 by Deborah Lipp   Pagan blogger Pax has declared June to be Pagan Values Month, and is asking Paganbloggers to write about Pagan values. Fundamental to our values, I believe, is pluralism. Everything we believe, even the lines we draw in the sand, ... Property of a Lady - http://www.deborahlipp.com/wordpress/

FULL CIRCLE * Earthwise News & Notes: Hecate on Pagan Values

3 Jun 2009 by Sia   thanks for blogging on pagan values--it's so needed since so many non-pagans think we have no values. I'm in the midst of writing a paper and trying to incorporate pagan values in some way, so this is very much top of mind. ... FULL CIRCLE * Earthwise News & Notes - http://fullcirclenews.blogspot.com/ Pagan Values, What Are They Exactly? 2 Jun 2009 by Dawn   Witchmoot is a community blog for witches and other members of the magical spiritual community. Dawn's Song - http://www.witchmoot.com/dawn.php - References Cernunnos' Path: Mythology and Paganism Blog » International Pagan ... 21 May 2009 by mahud   is it possible for me to join even if I am not a pagan? I really wanted to know what the real deal because I only knew pagan in some movie. Don't worry I am not a critic, I am just a curious people who respect other beliefs and trying ... Cernunnos' Path: Mythology and Paganism Blog - http://mythology.ourgardenpath.com/ -References Silver Maple - June is Pagan Values Month 28 May 2009 by dmiley   A number of different bloggers including Anne at The Gods are Bored, Erik at ExecutivePagan, Yvonne at too many blogs to count, but you can start here responded to Pax at Chrysalis for June to be bloggers Pagan Values Month. ... Silver Maple - http://dmiley.livejournal.com/ - References Iridescent Dark: Pagan Values Month: The Witches Pyramid 25 May 2009 by Haley @ Iridescent Dark   For Pagan Values Month, I will write four posts (one for each part of the above statement) about how I think these words embody the values that we as Pagans both uphold an strive to enact in our own lives. ... Iridescent Dark - http://iridescentdark.blogspot.com/ [ More results from Iridescent Dark ] Pagan Values - No Rules, OK? 3 Jun 2009 by Aquila ka Hecate   I had meant to start Pagan Values Month by blogging about some of the really cool valuesPagans share. Witches, Druids, Shamans,Goddess Folk, Reconstructionists, Mystics - I had a kind of general notion that they had a few things that ... Aquila ka Hecate - http://aquilakahecate.blogspot.com/ - References Pagan Values: Ecology, Environmentalism & Practical Pacifism 5 Jun 2009 by Ali   Ordinary people, whether they realize it or not, are incorporating the fundamental values of practical pacifism into their everyday lives: seeking out creative alternatives to callous destruction; practicing self-discipline and ... Druid Journal - http://druidjournal.net/ - References international pagan values blogging month 4 Jun 2009 by neowiccan   not a bandwagon i'm gonna be jumping on. i'm a pagan and i have values, but the values themselves are not intrinsically pagan. they're human values. i hate it when christians start yawping about how our country was formed on 'christian ... suz's muses - http://neowiccan.livejournal.com/ - References Pagan Values 6 Jun 2009 by Damon Leff   Despite our differences in belief and practice and in spite of the absence of any single unifyingpagan theology or philosophy we Pagans share by default the same values treasured by every preceding generation. ... Damon Leff - http://damonleff.livejournal.com/ Pagan Values: Go Play Outside! 6 Jun 2009 by Ali   I don't know if other Pagan writers experience this odd whine of feedback ringing in their ears, when one desire comes too close to another, one value rubs up against another.... There are times when I want to fill this blog with that ... Meadowsweet & Myrrh - http://meadowsweet-myrrh.blogspot.com/ Pagan Values Month 3 Jun 2009 by catvincent   Also good to see this by Dawn on the Witchmoot group blog, which asks “What are pagan values, exactly?”, which is more than a little critical of some aspects of the pagancommunity: We don’t want to be Christians. Not really. ... Cat Vincent's Oddities and Mutterings - http://catvincent.wordpress.com/ June is International Pagan Values Blogging Month 1 Jun 2009 by Borea   At least one of the folks I read regularly, Svartesol over at Vanic Thoughts, has begun this quest in earnest, and Pax at Chrysalis has collected previous instances of pagans writing about ethics and values on the web. Some other. The North Wind Was a Woman - http://borea-thenorthwindwasawoman.blogspot.com/ So What About These So Called Values 4 May 2009 by paganparentsote   Arrowind has been wanting to do a show on Pagan values for a while now and here it is. They talk about Her’s and Foxfire’s own personal interpretations of Pagan values and how those mix with personal values. We talk some about the kids ... Pagan Parents on the Edge - http://paganparentsote.podbean.com/  June 2009 is International Pagan Values Blogging Month! 13 May 2009 by Christopher Orapello   Pax at Chrysalis blog has declared this June to be International Pagan Values Blogging Month (IPVBM) . At his site there are a number of individuals participating in this event so be sure to check out all the great thoughts and feedback ... The Infinite and the Beyond - http://theinfiniteandthebeyond.blogspot.com/ Personal Values Inspired By Hellenic Polytheism 4 Jun 2009 by annyikha   Executive Pagan writes, “[T]he first thing that comes to mind is that I’m not clear on what 'pagan values' necessarily are” [link]. I think that's an apt assessment of pagan values, but with that I think it proper to also question which ... KALLISTI: An Apple in Pandemonium - http://pandemoniumapple.blogspot.com/ the dance of the elements: Pagan values 46 minutes ago by Yewtree   It is difficult to say with certainty that all members of the Pagan community subscribe to the same or similar values (it's always possible to find an exception who still counts as Pagan), but certainly many, if not most, Pagans aspire ... the dance of the elements - http://heartofflame.blogspot.com/ June 2009 is International Pagan Values Blogging Month! 31 May 2009 by Graeme K Talboys   Clas Myrddin - http://clasmyrddin.blogspot.com/ Musings of a Quaker Witch: June 2009 is International Pagan Values ...

Pagan Values: Ecology, Environmentalism & Practical Pacifism

5 Jun 2009 by Ali   A Guest Post by Ali, of Meadowsweet & Myrrh Back at the beginning of April, I wrote a blog post ostensibly about global warming, but also in part about the various forms that our own complicity in and justification of violence can often ... Daily Yoga - http://daily-yoga.org/

Pagan Values Month

28 May 2009 by Sarita   I just found out over at The Gods are Bored (here's the relevant post) that June is Pagan Values Month. Basically, that's when us Pagan bloggers are, to quote Anne, "supposed to talk about the deep philosophical underpinnings of our ... A College Girl's Days - http://collegegirlsdays.blogspot.com/

Dancing with Gaia

Dancing with Gaia is a new film by Jo Carson of Feraferia.

Many adults cannot recall the feeling of lying belly down on the earth, or harvesting plants as food. Many of us also feel disconnected from our basic right to experience joy in sexuality.

Earth energies, sacred sexuality and the living earth as Gaia are deeply connected, and Dancing with Gaia shows how they can be personally experienced.

The film has fifteen interviews with visionaries at sacred sites around the world, and looks like a must-watch film for Pagans and anyone else interested in reclaiming our ancient birthright of feeling at home in our bodies and on the Earth.

Earth Hour

Anybody out there heard about WWF’s “Earth Hour”? It started in Sydney, Australia, back in 2007 with 2.2 million homes and businesses turning their lights off for one hour to highlight the need for action on global warming and the seriousness of climate change. Following media coverage the simple event in Sydney in 2007 became a global affair in 2008 when over 370 cities and towns including many famous landmarks across the world, joined in for an hours blackout. This year WWF wants the event to become even bigger and really bring home to governments in every country that dangerous climate change won’t just go away and something needs to be done now and not when it is too late.

8:30pm, Saturday, 28th March is the time and date for this years “Earth Hour”. Sit on your own in candlelight or get together with friends and have a candlelit dinner party or maybe a storytelling session around the fire. There are various ideas for what to do (and how to raise money for WWF whilst doing it) on the WWF website where you can also register:

• UK
• International

Follow Up: Kiva and Pagan Charities

Just a quick follow up to Yewtree's comments about Pagan charities; Kiva, an organization Yewtree mentioned in her last post, is popular with Pagans for a number of reasons, but one is their wisdom in allowing members to join together in "teams"--groups whose members decide individually how and what to donate, but whose donations are tallied together.

This kind of strategy lets Pagans not only continue to support people who need it, but to demonstrate to outsiders that, though we lack the infrastructure many large religious institutions have, Pagans are also generous to those in need. As you might expect, there is already at least one Pagan team: the Wiccans, Pagans, Witches and Fellows team. What's next? Druid grove teams, Heathen kindred teams, Hellenic teams?

All of the above, I hope, and perhaps other charities will be savvy enough to follow suit. The ability to help someone in need and become visible as we manifest the Pagan spirit of hospitality will likely attract more of us to the charities that allow us to do this.

If you're interested, joining to Kiva is easy--PayPal as well as credit cards work just fine--and especially effective, since the money not donated for operating costs is actually given out as loans; once repaid, loans can either be sent out again, to help another individual or community, or reclaimed by the Kiva donor. (Technically, this does mean no charitable donation deduction is allowable on the loan amounts, something important to understand, but not much of a discouragement to make the loans, given the effectiveness of the strategy.)

Know of other charities that allow the formation of teams that allow Pagans a little positive visibility? Let us know: we'll pass it on!

Pagan charity work

In 2003, a Bush-administration official claimed that Pagans don't do charity work. I have heard this claim in other quarters as well.

However, there is a lot of service to the community and charity work being done by Pagans; it's just that we don't always get recognition, or seek it. There's a fascinating discussion of why there aren't many specifically Pagan charities at the Wild Hunt (see the comments section) and an older Witchvox article from 2003 musing over the very same topic.

Just last week, Jarred at The Musings of a Confused Man highlighted a charity that he is involved with called Kiva, where people can give microloans directly to people in the developing world.

I know personally two Wiccans who go to a homeless shelter to help out on Christmas day. (I bet they don't wear pentagram T-shirts there.) There must be many more.

Pagan chaplaincy for hospitals, the military, prisons and universities is another very important service offered by Pagans, in both the UK and the US, and all the chaplains are volunteers. It can be difficult for chaplains to get recognition, especially in universities.

Lots of covens, groves and hearths hold fundraising drives. Sometimes the charity they give the money to declines it, or doesn't acknowledge to other donors that it is from Pagans.

To me, Christian charities always seem like a thinly-veiled attempt to evangelise. You know, "look how nice Christians are, helping the poor and oppressed; that's why you should become a Christian".

That's why Pagans support (and get involved in) secular charity work: because we're not interested in making converts. And that's why Pagan charities are usually focussed on specifically Pagan issues, because other charities don't address those issues.

In fact, there aren't that many charities specific to other religions either, though many religions have an ethic of service. For instance, Sikhs give 10% (yes, 10%) of their income to charity, but there are no specifically Sikh charities that I know of. Jews are very charitable (Jewish housewives have a row of jam-jars labelled for different charities on their windowsills and put spare change in them, apparently) but I can't think of any internationally-known charity that is specifically Jewish. And so on and so forth for all the other major religions, but no-one accuses them of being away with the fairies and not caring about others. I expect Pagans donate more to environmental causes and animals, but that's good because other people always seem to be raising money for cancer and kids, but never for wildlife or oppressed tribal peoples.

4th Annual Brigid in the Blogosphere Poetry Slam--You're Invited

This just in from D. Oak of Branches Up, Roots Down:

Feel free to copy the following to your blog and spread the word. Let poetry bless the blogosphere once again!

WHAT: A Bloggers (Silent) Poetry Reading
WHEN: Anytime February 2, 2009
WHERE: Your blog
WHY: To celebrate the Feast of Brigid, aka Groundhog Day
HOW: Select a poem you like - by a favorite poet or one of your own - to post February 2nd.

RSVP: If you plan to publish, feel free to leave a comment and link on this post. Last year when the call went out there was more poetry in cyberspace than I could keep track of. So, link to whoever you hear about this from and a mighty web of poetry will be spun.

Feel free to pass this invitation on to any and all bloggers.
Thank you, Reya, for beginning what is now an annual event.

Note to all: Posting your contribution as a comment to this post at MetaPagan is also encouraged. Or, if you'd like to post contributions to the poetry slam to our blog aggregator, make your delicious label point to metapagan.events , and the feed will pick it up for you. (Detailed directions on how to use delicious to post to MetaPagan appear here.)

What MetaPagan is

The central section of MetaPagan (shown in the illustration on the right) is written by the editors, Yvonne Aburrow, Cat Chapin-Bishop, Jason Pitzl-Waters and Chas Clifton. It is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License, which means some rights are reserved: namely, to have our work properly credited to us, that you may not make derivative works, nor use the content for a commercial purpose.

You certainly may not pass off our work as your own writing.

The MetaPagan blog aggregator

The MetaPagan blog aggregator is hosted at Yahoo Pipes. People post notable Pagan-related blog-posts to Delicious.com. They only post a small amount of the post (about 10%) as a taster; they also post the title of the blog and of the blogpost, with a link back to the originating blog (that's how Delicious.com works). This drives traffic to the originating blogs. At no point is the content of the feed claimed to be the work of someone other than the original author.

In addition, with the permission of Jason Pitzl-Waters (obtained by me from him via email), posts from the Wild Hunt are merged in with the MetaPagan Pipe. There is also the Editor's Picks section, which works in a similar way, but using Magnolia.

Posts from the MetaPagan Yahoo Pipe are shown here using the widget (shown in the illustration below right). People are welcome, indeed encouraged, to add this widget to the sidebar of their blogs.

You are not encouraged to add any content from MetaPagan in the central section of your blogs or websites, where it would look as if it was written by you.

You may quote articles from MetaPagan under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License, provided that our work is properly credited to us, by author name. You may not make derivative works, nor use the content for a commercial purpose.

The URL of this blog is http://metapagan.blogspot.com/

Plagiarism

I've just discovered a post that I wrote for Autumn Equinox on someone else's blog, lifted in its entirety without my permission. The other blog did link back here, but I would prefer that they just quoted a small part of my post and linked back to it, not just lifted it in its entirety.

UPDATE: I emailed the lady who owns the site and got the following reply:

"I am really sorry, I had no idea they looked like my own posts, and that was most certainly not my intention - I thought there was a link and a credit to each post showing the source. I have removed all posts and taken the site down while I sort it out. I am not that clever with this sort of thing and had used some sort of add on with Wordpress to show posts from blogs I liked. It was a friend who sat down with me and set it up to bring back info from various sites; it was certainly never my intention to plagiarise."

The Pagan Collegium

Partly in response to the current explosion of discussion about what constitutes Pagan identity, and whether the Pagan community can retain its intellectuals and sceptics, Pax has set up a new site called the Pagan Collegium.

The Pagan Collegium is a free online resource for all modern Pagans and Neo-Pagans interested in expanding their base of knowledge and personal education, as well as anyone interested in learning and discussing our core topics within a Pagan perspective.

It is our hope to be able to recruit Department Chairs and Authors in our core topics of History, Philosophy, Sciences, and Theology; and to have them publishing articles and encouraging discussions on those articles.

If you want to participate either as an author or a reader, head on over there and comment to register your interest. If you want to be an author or a chair, post your qualifications as well.

Portuguese Pagan blogs

Some time back I did a couple of posts on French Pagan blogs and German Pagan blogs.

Today I received a request from a Brazilian lady who blogs in Portuguese to add her blogs to the Pagan blogs listing. So I have created a page of blogs in Portuguese.