Tonight, the day before the First of May, is Walpurgisnacht, a quasi-pagan Germanic holiday celebrating a English missionary/saint/abbess’ canonization. Of course, no one can tell you what she had to do with bonfires, so it seems that the name is just an excuse to keep doing what the pre-Christians wanted to do. I’ve never—to my [...]

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I’m rediscovering my love affair with Natalie Merchant. And either she sings a lot about the Devil or I interpret a lot of her songs about being about Him (okay…two that’s still a greater-than-normal number the kind of music she sings). These two songs are so soulful—almost longing—that it almost doesn’t match the subject. Or [...]

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In one (perhaps many) of Terry Prachett’s books, he opines that the strength of a god is dependent upon the number and strength of the belief in that god. But of course, gods don’t dies, so there are a number of ghost-gods whisping their way around reality, seeking believers. While practice has shown this is [...]

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Holiday spirit is in the air and I’ll be spending the day with friends, family, and more friends—the best way to do a holiday, in my opinion. But as the earth springs back to life (yes, it’s visible, even Where There Are No Seasons), I find myself gazing out of windows and breathing more deeply [...]

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The Washington Post has an online discussion forum called On Faith. Periodically (once a week?), they submit a question/topic to a panel of writers from various religions. This week’s is What is religion’s role in gender discrimination? I highly recommend the answers.

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I love Poe because she’s dark and soft, like black silk; she’s always softer than I expect and darker than that softness prepares me for. I always expect her to be a hard metal kind of sound—like an Evanescence—but find a ballad or soft rock instead. And once hearing that, I expect her lyrics to [...]

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I’ve been acquiring spider jewelry and clothes for a few years now, and I wear them fairly regularly. I have gotten strange looks but few people ask me about them (unless it’s around October, when I wear them more often, more of them, and more brazenly, in which case no one looks at me even [...]

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After the 9.1 earthquake and subsequent tsunami, my Facebook was abuzz with people publicly praying and soliciting prayers for Japan. There were also those who posted links to the Red Cross or exhorted their friends to text REDCROSS to 90999, but they were markedly fewer. It didn’t take long for people to start interpreting these [...]

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This seems eminently appropriate for Mind on Fire: Set Fire to the Rain, by Adele. It’s such a wonderful, terrifying image. I set fire to the rain! And I threw us into the flames. When we fell, something died. Throughout, she seems trapped in a relationship that she doesn’t seem to know how to escape—she [...]

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