Cultpunk 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)
Arthur C. Brooks writes for The Atlantic, pointing out that spiritual practice is at least as important as feeling and faith; perhaps no more so than for the growing demographic of those who profess to be “spiritual but not religious”. The right approach is to start practicing, notwithstanding your current state of belief and feeling. … Read more“How to Find Your Faith: the key to transcendence starts with a practice, not your feelings”
John Vervaeke and Christopher Mastropietro explore a change of perspective from ‘the religion that is not a religion’ to the philosophical Silk Road. How do we create a meaningful passage between the religions and those who have fallen out of religion? A heartfelt dia-logos and the start of a longer conversation on the subject. Personally, … Read moreThe Philosophical Silk Road
Inspiration from Brendan Graham Dempsey, caretaker of the Sky Meadow retreat center and principal of the Sky Meadow Institute: Despite the recent uptick of high-profile conversions to traditional Christianity, metamodern spirituality remains centered in progressive developments of and radically novel innovations to religion. Here I foreground and recall these efforts in the desire to reconnect … Read more“Metamodern Religion is Just Getting Started”
A trailer for a 2023 retreat with the Institute of Devotional Arts, whose manifesto reads: We believe we are both actors and spectators of the divine comedy we call life. As spectators, we cultivate our sense of wonder and reverence. As actors, we find ever new ways to give expression to the human experience. Devotion … Read moreThe Institute of Devotional Arts
Satanic Temple co-founder Lucien Greaves writes: Theistic religions often only differ from nontheistic religions, at their core, only in degree of intellectual humility. We identify with our mythology, our values and ethics are contextualized by our understanding of Satanism, but we view all knowledge as provisional, as we religiously believe in the value of intellectual … Read more“The Demons of Satanism & the Religions of the Nontheistic”