Third Annual Pagan Values Blogging Month

Pax of the Pagan Values Blogject has just announced the third annual Pagan Values Blogging Month.

You can sign up for it on Facebook.

Pax writes:

We must not be afraid to discuss the values and virtues and ethics we have discovered in our contemporary Pagan faiths. There are enough books on rituals and spells and prayers to last us a few generations… let's start writing works on confronting poverty and hunger from Pagan perspectives. Let us set aside the fear of prejudice, and the once glamorous but now tattered and worn mantle of the outsider and the rebel, and take pride in ourselves and our faiths, in our works and lives and worship and in our Pagan communities and our larger communities.

Learn more about the event.

When you get your contribution written/recorded and posted in June put a link to it in the comments stream on the Facebook page. Tags such as "PVE2011" and "Pagan Values" are also encouraged.

Pagan Values Blogging Month 2010 and 2009 produced some excellent reflections on Pagan values and virtues - it was popular theology in the making.

Pagan Values Month 2010

Last year, the highly successful Pagan Values blogging month organised by Pax of the Chrysalis blog attracted a huge number of high quality contributions from the Pagan community and beyond. Now June is approaching once more, and Pax has issued a call for contributions for 2010. I think this is an excellent project.

The Sun is nearing its height in the Northern Hemisphere and nearly hidden from view in the Southern Hemisphere. Midsummer and Yule, festivals of fire and of light. Times to exuberantly celebrate all that makes life bright and wonderful, and to light our personal and familial candles and hearth fires of our inspiration and nourishment in celebration of our beloved living.

Once more I issue a Challenge and a Call to my fellow Pagans, of every Pagan faith and path, to join me in blogging about Pagan Values in the month of June.

I invite you to share those Values and Virtues and Ethics and Ideals that you have found within whatever your Paganism is. How do you carry these jewels out into the world, thus enriching it and yourself, in your daily lives? What has living your Values taught you? How have the Ethics or Ideals of your particular Paganism challenged you? What have you discovered about yourself in your relationships with the Gods, and the world around you, and with the Ancestors, and with the Spirits of the World around you – however your individual Pagan path defines these things?

Brighid Poetry 2010

All the poems for Brighid can be seen at brighid2010 on delicious

Annual Poetry Blogfest in honour of Brighid

Anne Hill at Blog o'Gnosis has announced the fifth annual online poetry festival in honour of Brighid.

If you post your contribution to delicious.com using the tag brighid2010, all the posts will appear in one place. I will also add the tag to the MetaPagan pipe.

Help Haiti

Letter to the Pagan Community from Alane Brown, on behalf of Peter Dybing

Looking for a way to help the Haiti earthquake victims? Want to support an emergency medical clinic in Port au Prince that's run by a Pagan priest?

Please consider donating money to Haiti Community Support. This NGO is not itself affiliated with any political or religious group. However, the man running the clinic, Peter Dybing, is a member of the Covenant of the Goddess and a longtime practitioner of the Craft. He was very active in the Albuquerque Pagan community before relocating to the Virgin Islands a few years ago. There he met Mathilde and Bruce, who run Haiti Community Support. Haiti Community Support is a NGO that has been helping Haiti since 2006 through programs in health, education and infrastructure building.

Following the earthquake, Haiti Community Support shifted its emphasis to disaster relief. Peter (an EMT) and Mathilde traveled to Port au Prince on January 14th and set up an emergency clinic in a park. They recruited over 30 local Haitians and together they began caring for people who, despite severe injuries, just could not get into the overwhelmed hospitals. They arranged for shipments of medical supplies through a grassroots overland supply route from the Dominican Republic. At first, their medical supplies did not meet demand. They would treat patients until they ran out of supplies, then had to close up and wait for more. But as more donations began to come in, they were able to purchase more supplies, and can now make it through each long and grueling day. They treat wounds that have become increasingly serious because of the delay in treatment. Peter treats unset broken bones, cleans maggots from infected wounds and treats dysentery and other disease spreading through populations living in horrible conditions.

On January 23rd, ten more volunteers joined the clinic. They came from an Oregon rescue unit and from St. Croix Rescue. Now the clinic has a doctor, PA, nurse and several EMTs and paramedics. Together with the Haitian support personnel, they have expanded the clinic. Later this week they plan to go mobile, bringing the clinic to areas of Port au Prince where unmet needs are greatest. As the HCS emergency team looks to the future, their goal is to transition to a clinic run by Haitians, that can continue sustainably into the future. Peter says that the thing that impresses him
the most is the dignity with which his Haitian patients face their terrible losses.

The organization is all volunteer, so there is very little overhead. Funds sent to them are immediately converted into relief work -- buying medical supplies, as well as covering the expenses of transporting them and running the street clinic.

I've been talking with Peter by cell phone several times a week. He has asked me to get the word out to the Pagan community about what he's doing. Circle Sanctuary has posted a link on its website and announcements have been passed through Covenant of the Goddess lists. Please spread the word to your pagan contacts: by donating to www.haitisupport.org you can help those who are suffering, through the healing hands of a member of our spiritual community, Peter Dybing.

On a magical level, please take a moment to imagine Peter's hands and send the power of healing into them, and thus on to those he touches in Haiti. And most of all, please donate now! Go to www.haitisupport.org -- donations are tax deductible in the USA.

If you have questions, or want me to pass on a message of support to Peter, please contact me at alane@frontier.net Please feel free to pass on this message to other like-minded folk. I have donated $100 and I hope you will donate, too.

Alane Brown, elder priestess
Crow Women Circle and Goddess Choir
Durango, Colorado

Pagans at the Parliament

You can follow what Pagan representatives at the World Parliament of Religions are doing at the new blog, Pagans at the Parliament over at the Pagan Newswire Collective.

There are posts from T Thorn Coyle, Selena Fox, Andras Corban Arthen, CoG, and Ed Hubbard so far.

A triumphal progress

Ten Years of Triumph of the Moon
Academic approaches to studying magic and the occult: examining scholarship into witchcraft and paganism, ten years after Ronald Hutton’s The Triumph of the Moon

A collection of essays edited by Dave Evans and Dave Green

Contributions by: Ronald Hutton, Amy Hale, Sabina Magliocco, Dave Green, Henrik Bogdan, Phillip Bernhardt-House, R.A. Priddle, Geoffrey Samuel, Caroline Tully & Dave Evans

Congratulations to all involved in this - it looks great.

Pagans and academics alike should find this anthology useful, as it explores the changes in contemporary Paganism brought about by the publication of Triumph of the Moon - not least among these changes being the abandonment (by the vast majority of Wiccans) of any idea that Wicca is ancient.