Likewise, other religions found everywhere try to counter the restlessness of the human heart, each in its own manner, by proposing "ways," comprising teachings, rules of life, and sacred rites. The Catholic Church rejects nothing that is true and holy in these religions. She regards with sincere reverence those ways of conduct and of life, those precepts and teachings which, though differing in many aspects from the ones she holds and sets forth, nonetheless often reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men. . . . The Church, therefore, exhorts her sons, that through dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other religions, carried out with prudence and love and in witness to the Christian faith and life, they recognize, preserve and promote the good things, spiritual and moral, as well as the socio-cultural values found among these men.
~ Nostra Aetate, Second Vatican Council
So I've been hanging out with pagans lately.
There is a pagan community and nature preserve about thirty minutes away from where I live called Oak Spirit Sanctuary. I came across it about three-and-a-half months ago as I was looking to enhance my celebration of the Advent-Christmas season. I'm a medievophile, and I've always been attracted to the ethos of the (European, especially English) Middle Ages. I'm the kind of person who likes to hang out at Renaissance festivals. I love Arthuriana, Robin Hood, Vikings, and all the rest. I'm attracted to the seasonal and cultural celebrations that accompanied the celebrations of the Church Year in medieval and Renaissance times. So, this past Christmas, I was looking for some kind of classic "Yule"-type celebration to enhance my other Christmas traditions. Oak Spirit Sanctuary (OSS) was having such a celebration, so I decided to attend.
Anyone who knows me knows that this sort of boundary-crossing is nothing new to me. I've always been inclined to wander out of my own circles to explore those of others. I love crossing boundaries and bringing separate worlds together. In my high school days I used to attend synagogue regularly, hang out at mosques, and go Christmas caroling with Latter-day Saints, among other things. During my synagogue-attending days I began to learn some Hebrew. When the members of Temple Beth-El (a small, Reform Jewish congregation in Sedalia, MO) found out about that, they invited me to join the rotation in leading Shabbat services on Friday nights. The congregation was too small to keep their own rabbi during most of the year, so the members would rotate leading the services.
When I attended the Yule event at OSS, I very quickly fell in love with the place and with the community, and so I decided to continue to visit. OSS follows a yearly cycle of celebrations common in some forms of Neo-Paganism, a cycle which tracks to a significant degree the seasonal celebrations in various parts of medieval Europe and which were, in various ways, often celebrated by Christians as well. In fact, it is often very difficult historically to separate pagan and Christian strands out of these traditions because the two cultures became so intertwined. In addition to Yule, I have now attended Imbolc and Ostara as well (I'll talk about these a bit more below).
As a Catholic Christian who believes in the value of crossing boundaries in this kind of way, I wanted to take some time to briefly describe my own experience and how this works for me and to provide some general reflections. It is a bit tricky to write an article like this, since I recognize that I may have readers from both Christian and pagan backgrounds. The different mindsets of these traditions (with their different beliefs, concerns, ways of using language, etc.) make it difficult to speak in a way that will communicate well to both groups at the same time, but I'll do my best!
A Nuanced Relationship
First of all, I am a mainstream, orthodox Catholic, faithful to the Catholic faith as taught by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. I have a friend who describes himself as a Catholic of a heretical variety. He takes elements of Catholicism and blends them with elements of other religions in his own way without a commitment to be consistent with official Catholic teaching. His experience is a fascinating one, to be sure, but it is not the same as mine in this respect. My commitment to orthodox Catholicism provides both incentives as well as challenges to my attempt to make a religious connection outside the boundaries of the Catholic Church and Christianity.
There are incentives. As my quotation at the beginning of this article illustrates, the Catholic Church recognizes that there is truth and beauty in other religious traditions, and she encourages her children not only to recognize that but to respect, and even to preserve and to promote, such goodness and beauty. At the same time, there are challenges. There are elements of pagan practice that are inconsistent with orthodox Catholic belief and practice.
What this means for me is that my participation with the community at OSS has to be carefully nuanced. I want to join in with whatever I can, but there are elements from which I have to remain aloof. For example, as a Catholic, I will not participate in the invoking of spirits, magical practices, or the worship of pagan or nature deities.
For Catholics, one of the concerns about invoking spirits is that there is a danger of becoming involved with evil spirits. When I participate in events at OSS, I carry a rosary and cross and a pendant dedicated to Mary as well as praying for God's special protection and the protection of his angels.
But, while I must remain aloof from some things, I choose to see my relationship with OSS in an overall positive way, and I find much that I not only can participate in but that I find to be greatly enriching to my spiritual and personal life.
Some Beautiful and Valuable Virtues of Paganism
The spirit of modern paganism, at least of the sort encountered at OSS, I would characterize as one of joy and celebration. It is a delightful spirit that fills my heart with great encouragement and joy! When I listen to pagan folk music and participate with the community at OSS, I often find myself filled with the exuberance and joy of life. There is a great spirit of festivity, but a festivity full of religious mystery as well. It is difficult to convey this atmosphere in writing to someone who has not experienced it. Ironically (or perhaps not?), as I search about for some way of conveying the atmosphere I am speaking of, what comes to mind is the many instances of fauns, dryads, nymphs, and others dancing and celebrating in Christian author C.S. Lewis's famous Chronicles of Narnia. In The Horse and His Boy, the faun Tumnus describes the Summer Festival in Narnia, where "there'll be bonfires and all-night dances of Fauns and Dryads in the heart of the woods."1 Here is a snippet of a description of the Narnian "Great Snowball Dance" from The Silver Chair:
The noises she had been hearing turned out to be of two kinds: the rhythmical thump of several feet, and the music of four fiddles, three flutes, and a drum. She also got her own position clear. She was looking out of a hole in a steep bank which sloped down and reached the level about fourteen feet below her. Everything was very white. A lot of people were moving about. Then she gasped! The people were trim little Fauns, and Dryads with leaf-crowned hair floating behind them. For a second they looked as if they were moving anyhow; then she saw that they were really doing a dance—a dance with so many complicated steps and figures that it took you some time to understand it. Then it came over her like a thunderclap that the pale, blue light was really moonlight, and the white stuff on the ground was really snow. And of course! There were the stars staring in a black frosty sky overhead. And the tall black things behind the dancers were trees. They had not only got out into the upper world at last, but had come out in the heart of Narnia. Jill felt she could have fainted with delight; and the music—the wild music, intensely sweet and yet just the least bit eerie too, and full of good magic as the Witch's thrumming had been full of bad magic—made her feel it all the more.
All this takes a long time to tell, but of course it took a very short time to see. . . . Circling round and round the dancers was a ring of Dwarfs, all dressed in their finest clothes; mostly scarlet with fur-lined hoods and golden tassels and big furry top-boots. As they circled round they were all diligently throwing snowballs. (Those were the white things that Jill had seen flying through the air.) They weren't throwing them at the dancers as silly boys might have been doing in England. They were throwing them through the dance in such perfect time with the music and with such perfect aim that if all the dancers were in exactly the right places at exactly the right moments, no-one would be hit. This is called the Great Snow Dance and it is done every year in Narnia on the first moonlit night when there is snow on the ground. Of course it is a kind of game as well as a dance, because every now and then some dancer will be the least little bit wrong and get a snowball in the face, and then everyone laughs. But a good team of dancers, Dwarfs, and musicians will keep it up for hours without a single hit. On fine nights when the cold and the drum-taps, and the hooting of the owls, and the moonlight, have got into their wild, woodland blood and made it even wilder, they will dance till daybreak. I wish you could see it for yourselves.2
In these descriptions, I feel like Lewis has captured the atmosphere I have often felt at pagan events. There is a spirit there that fills the heart with a sense of exuberance, deep joy, freedom, and mysterious transcendence all at once, and which leaves one feeling one has encountered the Love and Joy that is at the root of all things. This is something that we Christians can resonate with and totally get behind. Christianity tells us that at the heart of all things there is a kind of Great Dance of love and joy - the Life of God. The foundation of all existence is the Supreme Being who is a Trinity of Persons, whose Being is the fullness of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty. The members of this Trinity - Father, Son. and Holy Spirit - eternally share this Divine Life and Beauty with each other in a relationship of supreme Love. The creation of the world is the overflow and outpouring of that Life and Love filling up the nothingness with their beauty and joy. And redemption in Christ is all about bringing all of us, who have been alienated from that Divine Life, back into full communion with it. When I am at a pagan event, God uses the spirit of that celebration to help put me in connection with this Divine Life.
The pagan atmosphere I have experienced is also one of love, compassion, empathy, caring, community, and the celebration of differences and individuality. One of the mottos of OSS is "Welcome Home!" And they truly mean it and practice it. Pagan spirituality and culture emphasizes the uniqueness of individuals and encourages the celebration of that uniqueness. People of all sorts are welcomed and loved and appreciated. From my first moments visiting at Yule, I felt at home. I felt I was able to be myself and that I would be valued and appreciated for who I am. We are one common humanity, and this is something one feels at OSS. It has been deeply meaningful for me personally. And, again, it is something Christians can get behind. We are all made in God's image and reflect, to some degree, his glory. We have value as our unique selves. Christian imagery describes the Church - the people of God - as a Body, which has a unity but consists of many distinct parts which are all important in their own way. "But God has so adjusted the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior part, that there may be no discord in the body, but that the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together; if one member is honored, all rejoice together" (1 Corinthians 12:24-26, RSVCE).3
Paganism encourages a deep connection to nature which I also appreciate. The world is God's creation, and it is full of life from God. It is something to be celebrated and protected and nurtured. God connects to us through it. During my time at OSS so far, I have already been encouraged to think more deeply about my own connection to nature. At the Ostara event this past weekend, there was a lecture about native Missouri flowers and an encouragement to plant them and spread them. I've had very little connection in my own life to gardening and planting, but I've been concerned for some time about the harm that our industrial society has done and continues to do to nature (not to mention the harm it does to our fellow human beings) and I have wanted to learn better how to live in a more nature-nurtuing way. Paganism's interest in and love of nature provides a much-needed emphasis here and I look forward to learning more from various members of the community.
Appreciating the Sacred in a Pagan Context
Christians have often recognized that God communicates truth and grace through the myths and practices of other religions insofar as they are rays reflecting the truth and beauty of God. I have encountered that at OSS in a number of ways.
I have already mentioned pagan celebrations and rituals. Pagan rituals involve elements that, as a Catholic, I cannot participate in, such as directly invoking spirits, worshiping various deities, and practicing magic. During these celebrations, I must bow out at certain times. But even when I must bow out, I can recognize elements of truth, goodness, and beauty that are there. At the Ostara festival this past weekend, the focus was on saying farewell to winter and welcoming spring. This was made concrete by the burning of an effigy of the goddess Marzanna after holding a wake for her dead form (symbolizing the dying and passing of winter). Another element of the ritual observances was an enactment based on the myth of Persephone, who lives with her husband Hades in the underworld during the winter but comes back to bring new life to the earth in the springtime, returning to her mother Demeter. As a myth, I can recognize much truth and value in it, as I, too, live in the world and experience the changing of the seasons. Enacting out these seasonal truths in a kind of concrete ritual celebration is not something that need be foreign to Christian sensibility, though Christians would not invoke or worship Persephone, Demeter, etc., as actual deities. And these myths have a deeper significance also, as they point to the fact that, spiritually speaking as well, life leads to death, and new life cannot come about except through death. To reach the Divine Life, we must die to self and to sin. We must suffer and be crucified with Christ in order to rise with him. God himself has died in order to bring us new life, and we must walk this path he has opened for us. (Romans 6; Galatians 2:20; etc.) The changing of the seasons is a temporal reality which points us to this deeper spiritual truth. During these celebrations, while abstaining from elements incompatible with my Catholic faith, I was able to participate in and be enriched by elements that were not only compatible with but which also fed my own Christian experience.
Myths, symbols, fantasy - all of these have been and are used by God to reach us and connect with us. Christians have often considered these things as "preparations for the gospel," and they can enrich our spiritual experience as Christians. I have been greatly enriched here by the thinking of modern Christian writers C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien (the latter a Catholic), both of whom used elements of pagan-inspired myth to convey spiritual realities and believed that this is a valuable practice. We've already seen this in my earlier quotations from The Chronicles of Narnia. Pagan references abound in this series. In Lewis's Space Trilogy, we see the gods and goddesses associated with various planets make an appearance in a positive way. (See especially the chapter "The Descent of the Gods" in That Hideous Strength.) And Tolkien introduces us to elves, goblins, and many other pagan-myth-inspired characters and creatures. The characters in his mythology also include the Ainur, who are powerful beings that are involved in the creation of the world and are often honored and invoked by the elves. In a fascinating and beautiful essay, "On Fairy-Stories," Tolkien laid out his vision of how all of these things are connected. I highly recommend it. In that essay, Tolkien says, "God is the Lord, of angels, and of men--and of elves."4
Nostra Aetate, the Church document from the Second Vatican Council I quoted from at the beginning of this article, after telling us that all religions "reflect a ray of that Truth which enlightens all men," goes on to say that the Church "proclaims, and ever must proclaim Christ 'the way, the truth, and the life' (John 14:6), in whom men may find the fullness of religious life, in whom God has reconciled all things to Himself."5 Catholics have often spoken of Christianity as the fulfillment and the fullness of all religion. This sounds condescending to a pagan perspective, for obvious reasons, and yet what is meant is simply that Catholics see Christianity and the Christian gospel as true. We believe it is true that there is one God, that he is a Trinity of Persons, that this one God created the world, that the world has fallen away from God, that God has reconciled and saved the world through Christ, etc. If these things are really true, then all other truths must find their context in these great overarching truths. For me, therefore, all spiritual practices and experiences direct me to God through Christ as their ultimate goal and context. All the truth and goodness and beauty found in the spiritual and the natural world flow from the foundation of the blessed fullness of life and love found in the Trinity and ultimately lead us back to the Trinity.
There are many stone circles and fire rings at OSS. Yes, there are elements in these things that Christians must remain aloof from. But the symbolism of these kinds of places - like the myths and images drawn from paganism in The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia - can also be a means of divine grace and experience of the divine. Because fantasy and pagan and medieval culture have been important parts of my own spiritual formation, I find myself deeply touched by these kinds of places, and I experience the sacred in them (cautiously!). There is a beautiful ritual circle area at OSS called Redbud Circle. I spent some time by myself there this past weekend and felt a deep connection to nature and to the sacredness of the place (sacred to me because of the symbolism connected to my background), and through these things to the divine life. There was a wonderful moment where I was in the midst of this experience and I heard a flock of wild geese in the distance. Wild geese are meaningful to me as a symbol of God's presence with me - something I derived years ago from Celtic Christianity which often uses the goose as a symbol of the Holy Spirit. So the combination of wild geese with the sacredness and beauty of Redbud Circle was deeply meaningful to me. My spiritual experience during this time also brought me in touch with difficult life-experiences I have been going through lately and had an encouraging and cathartic effect on me, helping to continue my healing.
There is another spot on the land called "Aphrodite's Grove" - a shrine area dedicated to the goddess Aphrodite. The goddess Aphrodite has personal meaning for me because of my own personal history. At the very beginning of my awakening to spiritual life and practice, back when I was thirteen years old, I got for my birthday a computer game (for my old Amiga computer - this was 1990) called Conquests of Camelot: The Search for the Grail. In this game, the player plays King Arthur who is searching for the Holy Grail to save his kingdom. The game designer, Christy Marx, clearly had a lot of Neo-Pagan influence. A major portion of the plot has to do with the Great Goddess and her manifestations in other goddesses. The Goddess particularly manifests as Aphrodite, and it is ultimately Aphrodite from whom Arthur must attain the Grail by passing a number of spiritual, mental, and physical tests. This game played an important role in awakening my spiritual sense and helped form the symbolism and imagery that would be meaningful to me throughout my life, so Aphrodite has always been an important spiritual symbol for me. Just to be clear - as a Catholic, I do not worship the goddess Aphrodite. However, she is a symbol of what might be called "the divine feminine." God connects to us in a variety of ways. He connects to us directly, but, according to Catholic spirituality, he also connects us to through his saints (and through sacraments, sacramentals, and other tangible means). There are Catholic saints who are patrons of various things, paralleling in some ways how pagan deities are gods or goddesses of particular things. The saints are not deities, but they are full of God's grace and so reflect, to some degree, his glory and goodness, and we honor them because of the presence of the divine life manifested in them. They intercede with us before God. God blesses us through them. The ultimate Saint is the Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, who is Full of Grace. Catholic theology defines "grace" as the "gift of the divine life." In Mary, we have an image - a feminine image - of a person filled with God's grace and thus with the divine life, reflecting the beauty of that life. God communicates truth and beauty to us through the feminine person and image of the Virgin Mary. So, while Mary is not God and not to be worshiped as God, she manifests the divine life and so can be called, in a sense, a manifestation - the manifestation - of the divine feminine. Myths and images of the Goddess in paganism also manifest to some degree the beauty of the divine life (again, as God uses myths and symbols to communicate himself to us and connect with us, like I talked about earlier). So there is a connection between pagan images/ideas of the Goddess and the Virgin Mary. For me, therefore, there is a connection particularly between Aphrodite and the Virgin Mary, because Aphrodite, to me, is a mythic symbol that God has used to connect with me, manifesting the beauty of the divine through a feminine image, and the Virgin Mary also connects with that reality. I was therefore delighted to find a shrine to Aphrodite on the land. And I was even more delighted when I found that among the statues and images at the shrine, there is a statue of the Virgin Mary. I had never encountered this connection before outside my own experience, so this was a very meaningful manifestation of God's providence for me.
The festival of Imbolc, which I attended last month, focused on the Irish goddess Brigid. The central ritual involved calling on Brigid to bring hope in the coming year. But Brigid the goddess is bound up with St. Brigid of Kildare, a famous Irish saint (the patroness saint of Ireland). Imbolc is also called St. Brigid's Day. This is a good example of the historical overlap and interwoven quality of pagan and Christian practices and celebrations. While I could not invoke Brigid as a goddess, I was able to celebrate St. Brigid (whose associations parallel those of her goddess version to a great degree) and participate in that way with the community (while abstaining from the specifically magical and deity-worshiping elements).
Time for a very brief excursus: Why do Catholics not consider the saints to be minor deities? There is no doubt that there is significant overlap between how gods and goddesses function in paganism and how the saints function in Catholicism (especially when various deities are seen as manifestations of some higher Supreme Being). The parallels are striking and obvious. (Protestants are often happy to point them out as they accuse Catholicism of being too pagan!) I think the difference is rooted in the different worldview-constructs of paganism vs. Christianity. In paganism, polytheism is often at the core of the view of the world. The universe is a place of chaos where various gods bring a limited order. The gods have a kind of independence. They are even often at odds with each other in the myths of various cultures. Monotheism, on the other hand, roots the universe in the unified order of one Supreme Being (although Christianity makes that supreme reality one of relationship and love because of the Trinity). There are no competing principalities. Even Satan and his demons are fallen angels, deriving everything from God and only doing their works under God's permissive will. In this view, only one Being has a right to be treated as Supreme. There are no other autonomous or independent powers or authorities. The Abrahamic traditions manifest this conviction by refusing to allow other entities besides God to be treated as deities, maintaining a strict ontological divide between Creator and creatures. And yet, in these traditions, other entities exist and have limited supernatural powers (derived ultimately from God). Angels are created by God. The saints, including Mary, are mere humans who have been raised up to share in the divine life as a gift of unmerited grace (a destiny all of us are called to). So, in Christian language, we do not "worship" angels or saints as "gods," and Christians must stay away from giving "worship" - supreme value and authority - to any being other than God. (However, there are some forms of paganism in a broad sense - Hinduism being perhaps the most obvious example - where there is a strong recognition of a Supreme Being and that lesser deities are derived from him. I think there is room for fruitful dialogue here regarding how we should understand the similarities and the differences between this kind of view and the view of the Abrahamic religions.)
My love of and history with Arthuriana also gives me a connection to paganism, as the legend of King Arthur is something both traditions have an interest in and the Arthur story has been told in both Christian and in pagan ways (and often involving a mix of the two). In the early days of OSS, the community was called Ozark Avalon, a reference to Arthurian legend.
Catholic and pagan cultures also share the celebration of May and Maying traditions. I've always been attracted to Maying traditions because of their connection with medieval culture and with Arthurian and Robin Hood stories. Maying festivies have included things like maypole dancing and the crowning of a May Queen and sometimes a May King. OSS, along with many pagan groups, celebrates Beltane, a pagan version of this Maying tradition which involves such historic customs. While pagans at OSS will be crowning May royalty, Catholics in the community will be celebrating the Virgin Mary who is associated with the month of May. In fact, one of the common traditions among Catholics during May is to give Mary a May Crowning where statues of the Virgin are crowned with wreaths of flowers, celebrating Mary as Queen of Heaven and Earth. Mary is the ultimate May Queen!
A Beautiful and Loving Community
The time I've spent at Oak Spirit Sanctuary so far has been deeply enriching and meaningful to me. I have been enriched by the connection to nature, the sacredness of the land, the spiritual practices, and, certainly not least, the wonderfully joyful and caring community. OSS has given me an acceptance and welcome that has meant a lot to me. Even in the short time I've been visiting, I have come to love this community. One of my friends at OSS told me that people tend to find out about the community when they need it. This has certainly been true for me, and I am forever grateful to the people of the community for their love and acceptance of me even over just these past three months. I look forward to many years to come. I mentioned above that one of the mottos of OSS is "Welcome home!" It's on the sign on the front gate and people say it to each other frequently. This, again, is personally meaningful to me because I have often remembered over the years since becoming Catholic how one of my RCIA sponsors who helped guide me into the Catholic Church back in 2016 wrote a congratulatory card to myself and my family upon our entering the Church, and in that card she wrote, "Congratulations and welcome home!" Catholics often say that to those who have joined the Church, and I've always treasured that welcome. I don't believe that anything happens by chance, and I am grateful to God for the parallel.
The Value of Crossing Borders
All of us are members of the same human family, but we all-too-often miss out on the full experience of that fact because, for most of us, it is our tendency to stay within our own borders. We also often miss all the truth and beauty that we have to share with each other. As a Christian, my spiritual life is greatly enriched because of my ability to draw from the rich spiritual experiences in pagan life and practice. I am grateful to God that he has given me a personality that has a natural tendency to want to cross borders and bring people together, and I see it as a calling in my life to help build these kinds of connections. The Church has encouraged us Catholics to get out and get to know our other human brothers and sisters, to dialogue, to collaborate, and to help build together a respectful and loving community. This was a major theme of one of Pope Francis's recent encyclicals, Fratelli Tutti (which means "all brothers"), which closes with a couple of beautiful prayers asking God to help us remember our common humanity and to work together in love to better the world.
During the closing ritual at Ostara this past weekend, one of the celebrants reminded us that life is followed by death, but that through death comes new life. I left that celebration to go to St. Thomas More Newman Center Parish in Columbia to celebrate Palm Sunday and the beginning of Holy Week, where Catholics celebrate how Christ's life led to his death, and how his death led to a resurrection of new life for himself and for all the world. I can think of no connection more fitting!
St. Brigid, Holy Mary Mother of God, and all the saints, pray for us!
Blessed Be!
1 C.S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy (New York: Collier Books, 1970), 72.
2 C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair (New York: Collier Books, 1970), 191-193
3 The Revised Standard Version of the Bible: Catholic Edition (Washington, DC: The Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America, 1965, 1966), taken from the Bible Gateway website at https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1+Corinthians+12&version=RSVCE on 3/25/24.
4 J.R.R. Tolkien, "On Fairy-Stories", The Tolkien Reader (New York: Ballantine Books, 1966), 70-73).
5 Nostra Aetate (October 28, 1965) 2, http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vatii_decl_19651028_nostra-aetate_en.html.
Published on Monday of Holy Week
ADDENDUM 3/29/24: Just to be clear, this article is autobiographical in nature, and is not intended as an overall catechesis on the Catholic view of non-Catholic religion. If one is looking for a more holistic, objective catechesis of this sort, one might start (in addition to the content and the links already provided within the article, including the link to Fratelli Tutti) with Nostra Aetate #1, 2, and 5 (this is the Second Vatican Council document I quoted from in the article), and then one might look at The Catechism of the Catholic Church #836-848, 856. If one wishes to go a bit further, one might also consult these documents here, here, and here.
While I'm "addending," let me also provide a link to Laudato Si, in which Pope Francis has laid out a case for the care we owe to nature (since I mentioned in the article how love of and care for nature is important in paganism).
ADDENDUM 6/22/24: Since I wrote this article, I’ve been continuing to reflect on pagan ideas and practices. My observations and reflections have led me to recognize greater nuances in how various concepts, like “magic,” are understood in the Neo-Pagan community. See here for some further thoughts on some of these things, looking at them and evaluating them from the perspective of a Catholic worldview.
ADDENDUM 10/23/24: See here for more on pagan inspiration in C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.
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