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.

Spirituality, identity and community

Spirituality is a curiously nebulous experience, and the word can mean a variety of things, which sometimes conflict with each other. I once saw an academic paper entitled "Spirituality: A Glowing And Useful Term In Search Of A Meaning" by Lucy Bregman. Spirituality is often a largely individual response to what stirs the spirit (whether that is immensity, beauty, sexuality, landscape, compassion for others, or whatever). A person can be "spiritual but not religious" which often means that they have chosen not to identify with any particular religious grouping. Or they can be mystical, which means other people will probably assume they are impractical, even though mystics often come up with highly practical suggestions for solutions to real-life problems (think of Gandhi, for example). But being a mystic is a great thing to be, though it usually means you'll get persecuted for heresy (think of Baruch Spinoza and Giordano Bruno), or at least suspected of it (think of Hildegard of Bingen and Francis of Assisi).

When we do choose to adopt a label (be it Pagan, Druid, Witch, Wiccan, reconstructionist, UU, QuakerPagan, or whatever) we immediately realise that there are other people who use the same label differently. Flaky, fluffy people who go on about the Burning Times; or Christian Quakers and Christian Unitarians who don't want Pagans joining their movement (these objectors seem to be a minority, as it happens); or people who don't want Paganism to be too public, or too intellectual, or too theological, or not countercultural enough, and strongly resist any such developments. All labels are constantly being pulled in one direction or another. People are constantly moving from one religious identity to another until they find one that fits their spiritual journey.

But is a religious label really about beliefs, or about participating in community, and sharing values and practices? Is it about doing something for the wider community? Or about a quest to understand the world and know how to live in it well? When does identifying with a label become membership in the group? Where and how does membership end? If you were accused of practising your religion in a court of law, would there be enough evidence to convict you?

Perhaps religion is really a convincing narrative that helps to confer meaning on the world and our place in it. Even if it isn't literally true, it's symbolically true and internally consistent.

A lot of people are saying they have outgrown Paganism; many more are saying Paganism needs to grow - to reassess its values, its anti-intellectualism, and its lack of interest in theology.

Of course there are many intellectual Pagans, but often they feel isolated amongst the fluffy and the flaky. But you don't have to leave your brain at the door to join the Pagan community, and long may it remain so. Nevertheless there is some really bad amateur scholarship out there, and some of it is really cringeworthy. We have to do better. Every time I do a search for seasonal blogposts to include in a round-up of posts about Pagan festivals, I have to reject dozens because they include incorrect assertions about the history of the festival.

But if you are an intellectual Pagan, or an atheist Pagan, or a non-theist Pagan - don't despair! There are others out there.