Pagans and the geofence

Geofencing has become a major tool for marketers, but the technology grants corporations an unsettling amount of insight into individual behavior – including their religious activities.

Column: Festival Fragility and Sacred Fire Circle in Paradise

[Festival season is beginning in the United States as Spring returns and warmer weather creeps slowly back into our lives. Today we welcome guest columnist Star Foster to talk about her festival experience. Foster is a polytheist living in the Midwest. She is a former Pagan Channel editor at Patheos, and she is allergic to cats.]
“This the best shit Pagans are doing right now.” – Murphy Pizza, Ph.D, author of Paganistan
“It’s a spiritual banquet. You get to choose what you put on your plate.

Pagan Community Notes: JD Taylor, Where Witchcraft Lives, Brimming Horn Meadery and More!

It was announced last week that blues musician and activist JD Taylor has died. Taylor was known to the Bay Area Pagan community, performing at the Berkeley Pagan Festival, PantheaCon, and Elderflower. Although she wasn’t Pagan herself, Taylor was heavily involved in regional “women’s and LGBT activist communities.”  As noted by the Bay Area Reporter, “some would remember Ms. Taylor as the small woman who was the subject of a photo showing her being beaten by a very large SFPD officer during the Castro Sweep police retaliation in the Castro on October 6, 1989.” Taylor was born in New Jersey in 1946, moving to San Francisco in 1975.

Harvest Gathering offers New England bounty

ORANGE, Conn. — Harvest Gathering is not the only Pagan festival to welcome participants home upon arrival, but its staff put a lot of energy into the idea. The theme came up again and again over the course of the four-day event, and it was evident in the increasing spring in the step of many an attendee. How many harvest events open the first feast to all comers, whether or not they paid for the meal plan? This one does, and it not only helped this first-timer feel welcome, it set the tone of “harvest event” from the outset. Perhaps Harvest Gathering had exactly the right number of people in attendance, at 163, which is right around Dunbar’s number.