The Dionysian Naturalist

Sacred Nature Awakened:   Reclaiming the Dionysian in Religious Naturalism My Dream for a Proposed Gifford Lecture Series (8 Lectures) University of St. Andrews 2030 Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Some dreams feel too bold to speak aloud—but they have a way of charting the future. If I could stand on the Gifford Lectures stage at St. Andrews in 2030, this is the series I would deliver: a sweeping history and passionate renewal of Religious Naturalism, calling it to awaken its Dionysian soul.   Religious Naturalism (RN) has emerged over the past century as a bold alternative to both theism and reductive materialism, seeking to ground religious meaning, ethical orientation, and spiritual depth within a fully naturalist worldview. Thinkers from Jerome Stone to Ursula Goodenough, Donald Crosby, Wesley Wildman, Robert Corrington, Carol Wayne White, Loyal Rue, and the naturalistic pagans have crafted diverse visions of sacred nature—ranging from evolutionary epics and tragic ...

                                                                             The Golden Mean:   Seeking Balance Between the Apollonian and the Dionysian   Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. Abstract This essay argues that contemporary spiritual movements suffer from an increasingly unstable split between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. Drawing on Nietzsche’s archetypal contrast—Apollo as order, rationality, and luminous restraint; Dionysus as ecstasy, embodiment, and sacred excess—the essay contends that Religious Naturalism has leaned heavily toward Apollonian respectability, securing scientific credibility while often muting ritual intensity and transformative passion. At the same time, some ecstatic and neo-pagan currents risk celebrating Dionysian fi...

  Dionysian Naturalism as Queer Religiosity Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D. What does it mean to speak of a “queer religiosity”? The phrase itself sounds paradoxical to many ears, evoking friction between institutional religion and queer life. For centuries, queer people have been vilified, pathologized, and exiled by dominant religious orders. Yet queer religiosity exists—and flourishes—not in spite of this rejection but as a response to it. It is often eclectic, anti-institutional, erotic, earth-based, and deeply political. In recent decades, scholars have documented how queer spiritualities emerge from lived experience and marginalized ways of knowing, developing ritual practices and cosmologies that reject the binaries of body/spirit, nature/culture, and sacred/profane. In this sense, queer religiosity is less a set of doctrines than an embodied stance toward the sacred—what Mark Jordan calls a “disidentificatory” theology that refuses the disciplinary norms of heteron...