A short documentary on Edinburgh’s annual Beltane Fire Festival, a revival of the ancient Celtic custom whose more recent roots dates back to the 1980s, when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher attempted to crack down on rave culture in the United Kingdom.
Brendan Graham Dempsey of the Sky Meadow Institute interviews Swan Frayne-Dao, director of the Institute of Devotional Arts. The Institute plans to hold its first American gathering at the Sky Meadow Retreat Center in July.
I’ve recently returned from Sky Meadow, a soulful home-away-from-home retreat center deep in Vermont’s magical Northeast Kingdom. The Spring ’24 retreat was part of an ongoing series conceived and hosted by Brendan Graham Dempsey and Layman Pascal (whose own reflection upon the event is available here). The theme for this season was “God” (or perhaps … Read moreThe Spring 2024 Metamodern Spirituality Lab at Sky Meadow
An elegant expression of the CultPunk/Poetic Faith perspective courtesy of Ross Douthat, writing for The New York Times: Start with the broad youthful impulse toward what you might call magical thinking, ranging from the vogue for astrology to the TikTok craze for manifesting desired outcomes in your life. In certain ways this is an extension of the … Read more“Be Open to Spiritual Experience. Also, Be Really Careful.”
Sigal Samuel writes for The Atlantic: Modern black witches are practicing Yoruba-based faiths, with a few Millennial touches. They build altars to ancestors so they can seek their advice on everything from romance to professional advancement, cast spells using emoji to help banish depression, surround themselves with crystals in the hope that they will relieve stress, and … Read more“The Witches of Baltimore”
The Church of the Flying Saucer follows Carol Klodie, a former film school student who has hit a slump in her life. By happenstance, she finds a pamphlet under the windshield of her car advertising what seems to be a support group for UFO abductees and alien conspiracy theorists. She finds the pamphlet ridiculous and … Read more“Church of the Flying Saucer” (May 2024)