Sad to learn of the recent passing of Steve Aydt, a longtime fixture, mover and shaker in the Texan counterculture scene and founder of the Eulessyinian Hot Tub Mystery Religion. I interviewed Steve on that subject in late 2024, and that interview is part of the second volume of the anthology Poetic Faiths: New Religions … Read moreIn Memoriam: Steve Aydt (1963-2026)
Just returned from our much-anticipated, at-least-annual visit to the Sky Meadow Retreat in Vermont’s Northeastern Kingdom mountains. The Sky Meadow property was first developed as a working farm in the 1850s, later became derelict, was rehabilitated and transformed into a spiritual/nature retreat in the 1980s and sustains a more recent ambition to serve as the … Read moreSky Meadow 2026
Isabelle Gerretsen writes for the BBC: At the start of the Odyssey, the epic poem’s war-weary protagonist finds himself trapped on a remote island by the goddess Calypso. She promises Odysseus immortality and eternal youth if he chooses to stay with her. But after 10 years of waging war against the Trojans alongside other Greek heroes, Odysseus … Read more“For 1,000 years, a cult worshipped the hero of the Odyssey”
In Zilpha Keatley Snyder’s The Egypt Game (1967), a group of children transforms a hidden yard into an improvised sacred world inspired by ancient Egypt. They invent names, costumes, gods, ceremonies, initiations, sacrifices, funerary rites and an oracle, gradually developing a shared mythology that feels consequential without requiring literal belief. As an example of cultpunk … Read moreThe Egypt Game
Coincident with the recent Metamodern Meaning Lab at Sky Meadow, Brendan Graham Dempsey interviewed [M] Dudeck and Javi Acevedo on their upcoming book Xenotheology: The Transmedial Scriptures and on the practice of creating one’s own religion as a work of art.
The inimitable M. Dudeck on This Podcast is a Ritual, discussing Xenotheology and the intimate relationships between imagination and spirituality.
Charles Foster writes for Aeon on the subject of edginess: The cosmos is an edgy place. We are on the far edge of a rapidly expanding Universe, hurtling into nothing. Earth is now further away than it was when you began to read this sentence, from the place where, at the time of the Big … Read more“Embrace the edge!”