I’m honored to have been invitied to join in an interfaith blog conversation held by Mike (writing from the Mahayana Buddhist perspective), Jon (a Protestant Christian), Sojourner (pagan/UU), and Matt (an evangelical Christian) — all bloggers I hold in high esteem. Every month (or thereabouts), we write on a topic of interest to us all. This month’s topic is faith:

What is your view regarding the meaning and the role of faith? What importance does it play in your community and in your daily life?

The links to the other articles in the conversation will be updated as they are posted:

[Mike's Essay] [Jon's Essay] [Sojourner's Essay] [Matt's Essay]

Faith in Druidism

Faith in Druidism is a tricky topic.

There are plenty of polytheistic druids, who try to adhere as closely as they can to the pantheon of gods worshipped by the ancient Celts. I am one of those. Then there are duotheistic druids, who believe in a God and Goddess, much as many Wiccans do; and panethiestic druids, and animist druids… There are druids who worship a pantheon of gods who were admittedly made up (or discovered?) out of thin air by college students in the 1960’s. There are druids that practice a mixture of Celtic mysticism and Buddhism (which are not nearly so far apart as you might think — in fact, the similarities are frequently striking). There are even Christian druids, who practice a form of Christianity native to Scotland and Ireland in the latter half of the first millenium (known as “Celtic Christianity”). For all I know, there may be agnostic or atheistic druids as well.

How can this be? What unites all these belief systems? Read the rest of this entry »

I’d just like to point you all to a new page I’ve set up called “Other Voices” — you can find the link to it over next to the sun seal under “Pages”. It’s my Blogroll 2.0.

I’ve been meaning to set up my Blogroll properly for ages. The links were falling out of date, it no longer reflected my own reading properly, and frankly I thought that having a tiny little link buried over on the sidebar was a sorry way to repay the authors I enjoyed reading so much. Really I’d like to do reviews of all my favorite bloggers, much like Kara-Leah Masina is doing, but my blogging schedule simply won’t allow it.

Instead I’ve set up a whole page of links, and next to each link are a few words drawn from the author’s web site. The quotes are intended to give a tiny taste of the author’s style, and hint at what the web site is about. I had a lot of fun finding just the right quotes…

In some cases, I had to compress the quotes to fit them under my word limit. If you’re an author, and you feel like I picked a bad quote for you or mangled your words, BY ALL MEANS let me know and I’ll change it however you like. I don’t want you to feel misrepresented; and I want to send people your way, because I think the world would be a better place if more people read your stuff. ‘Nuff said.