Somewhere between the rock-ribbed skepticism that is satisfied with saying “no” and the credulity of true belief in the supernatural – or maybe not between those poles, but the third point in a triangle – is the sentiment of poetic faith expressed in legendary singer/songwriter Don McLean’s haunting Sister Fatima. Lyrically inspired by the text of … Read moreSister Fatima
My new article for OnlySky Media, Oscar Wilde’s ‘Confraternity of the Faithless’ discusses Wilde’s notion of “agnostic ritual” and its modern interpretation via the Oscar Wilde Temple art installation/secular ritual space: More than a century after Wilde’s death, the artists David McDermott and Peter McGough opened a joint immersive art project/secular ritual space, The Oscar Wilde Temple, … Read moreMore on “Oscar Wilde’s ‘Confraternity of the Faithless’”
Professor Stephen Asma writes for Aeon on the potentials of a science of the imagination: Philosophers like Ernst Cassirer and psychologists like Jung focused on the ritual or visual symbol (rather than literal language) as a way of enacting meaning. Images, objects and rituals of mythopoetic cognition are imperative rather than indicative. If we’re immersed, then a dance … Read moreImaginology
Click here to listen to my recent discussion with Stephen Bradford Long on the Sacred Tension podcast, centered on the themes of mythmaking, poetic faith and nontheistic ritual/religion.
An excerpt from this classic of the ’60s counterculture: How to Start Your Own Religion First, decide with whom you will make the voyage of discovery. If you have a family, certainly you will include them. If you have close friends, you will certainly want to include them. The question, with whom do I league for … Read more“Start Your Own Religion” (Timothy Leary, 1967)
This is what really happened; in 1917, and again in 1920, two rural English schoolgirl cousins went into the local woods and took photographs of paper cutouts shaped like fairies. All historical evidence suggests that the girls intended nothing more than a simple, silly prank, which then spiraled out of their control. As one of them … Read moreSkepticism, Faith and Compassion in “FairyTale: A True Story” (1997)
From an interview with artist/healer AA Bronson: What happens in the séances? The séances are designed in a format suitable to the history of the location: in New Orleans, we have devised a ritual that utilizes the methods of Afro-Caribbean spiritual traditions, especially Voodoo, together with the methods of European ceremonial magic. Peter and I … Read moreInvocation of the Queer Spirits: The Arts of Ritual, “Seance” and Memorial
“Religion does not help me. The faith that others give to what is unseen, I give to what one can touch, and look at. My gods dwell in temples made with hands; and within the circle of actual experience is my creed made perfect and complete: too complete, it may be, for like many or … Read more“Every Thing to be True Must Become a Religion”: Oscar Wilde’s Confraternity of the Faithless
Artist Peter McGough explains the Oscar Wilde Temple, a secular “celebration of the creative process through which experience is transformed into art and reality abstracted into revelation.” For more information on this project, please see the Oscar Wilde Temple website.
In his 1909 book Memories of My Life, English polymath Sir Francis Galton reflected – in the language of his era, whose sentiments on civilization do not match our own in some regards – on several curious and creative experiments in poetic faith: In the days of my youth I felt, at one time, a passionate … Read moreSir Francis Galton Worships Mr. Punch