The Dionysian Naturalist

  Larisa A. White World Druidry: A Globalizing Path of Nature Spirituality. Belmont, CA: Larisa A. White Publisher. 1st edition 2021 322 pp $48 Within the last 25 years Nature Religions of all types have significantly increased in popularity across the globe.   While still a tiny fraction of the global religious landscape, they are having a significant impact upon our cultural imaginations.   Moreover, many of these practitioners are the vanguard of a sustainability revolution, forging new lifestyles that minimize carbon footprints.   In the United States there are now more Pagans that Presbyterians. Nature Religions are defined by their focus on the sacredness of nature.   While indigenous religions, such as those of Native Americans, are the oldest representatives of these religions of nature, recently various forms of Paganism have taken form and are rapidly growing in size across the globe.   Included here would be spiritual approaches as diverse as Cel...

                                                                             On Progressive Prophetic Activism: How CLUE Works Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Religion and spirituality bring to social movements and struggles for social change a moral framework for activism, motivating our work for justice and compassion.   They bring communities of faith who passionately support our work and provide us leadership.   They give us a sense of purpose. Ours is a progressive prophetic activism with a vision of the Beloved Community in which all people share the wealth of the Earth.   In The Beloved Community, poverty, hunger, and homelessness will not be tolerated because standards of human decency will not allow it. We read religious texts as pointing ...

                                                                        Some Social Justice Prayers Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. The following prayers were originally written in 2017-2018 to accompany my essay “Bearing Witness to Social Injustice as a Spiritual Practice”.  At the time I  was concerned with the process of eyewitnessing things that shouldn't exist and turning that experience into holy work contributing to the advance of social justice.  We were two years into the Trump Administration and I felt as if the arc of the moral universe was no longer bending toward justice. In the midst of this time of increasing suffering one event stood to me: the gathering of five hundred interfaith clergy in Standing Rock to peacefully bear witness to the desecrati...

  BOOK PROSPECTUS A rough working draft THE NEW RELIGION OF NATURE:  HOW A HYBRID OF PAGANISM AND RELIGIOUS NATURALISM, TWO EMERGING EARTH-CENTERED SPIRITUALITIES,  COULD BECOME AN INSURGENT ECO-THEOLOGY AND THE DOMINANT SPIRITUAL ORIENTATION OF UNITARIAN UNIVERSALISTS AS THESE 200,000 SPIRITUAL ACTIVISTS LAUNCH THE SUSTAINABILITY REVOLUTION OUTLINE OF CHAPTERS 1. Steps Towards a Dionysian Naturalism 2. Enchanting Naturalism 3. Our Universe is a Sacred Living System 4. Dancing with Dionysus: Ecstasy, Naturalism and Religion in the Age of the Anthropocene 5. Nature Religions and Revolutionary Social Change: Advancing a Practical Theology for Spritual Activism 6. Bearing Witness to Social Injustice as a Spiritual Practice 7. Tripping with the Gods: On Entheogenic Spirituality 8. The New Religion of Nature: Creating a Hybrid of Religious Naturalism, Paganism and Druidry (in progress) 9. On the Epic of Evolution (in progress) 10. Naturalizing the Western Esoteric Traditi...