About Me and This Blog My name is Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D and I am interested in developing a religious orientation I call "Dionysian Naturalism". While I attend a Unitarian Universalist (UU) congregation in Santa Barbara and largely accept the progressive humanism espoused there, I also am passionate about elements of spirituality that are more Dionysian. UUs can sometimes be terribly Apollonian--good at the rational pronouncement of abstract ideas, skilled in crafting logical arguments that build a systematic theology and passionate relating intellectual scholarship to theological currents. They are less good at the Dionysian--those spiritual elements that are ecstatic, mystical, corporeal, based in emotion, intuition and instinct. Nietzsche might have been the first modern self-proclaimed Dionysian Naturalist and his thinking greatly inspired me as I sought to create my own personal theology. Some of the articles found here appeared in No...