Culture and Community: Rebirth of a Bay Area Community Staple

There are many elements of community that help to build and sustain culture. Local community culture often ebbs and flows with the change of faces around the circle and the opportunities for engagement among the intersecting elements. The Bay Area, like most communities, has events, shops and memories that help to cultivate a local Pagan culture. The Pagan Festival has been one of the many such events in the Bay Area that has been a staple for the community for the last 14 years. This festival has been running since 2001, when it was previously known as the Interfaith Pagan Pride Parade and Celebration.

Hospitality: a Pagan value?

The journey to report on the Sacred Space/Between the Worlds conference was difficult. What would have taken four hours on the road on a clear day was seven through a late-winter snowstorm on the Eastern seaboard, driving forty miles an hour past at least a dozen vehicles which hadn’t fared very well in those conditions. Journey’s end, however, included welcomes from familiar faces, introductions to local luminaries, and an invitation to lunch with a group of Southern witches who simply wanted to show some hospitality. Those warm gestures led to this question: what role does hospitality play in your tradition? Those who were able to respond created a rich tapestry of perspectives. Byron Ballard, Mother Grove Goddess Temple:
I always cringe in interfaith circles when we try so hard to find That One Thing that we all do.

Impressions from PACO, a Pagan Activist Conference Online

This past weekend, more than fourscore Pagans attended the first Pagan Activism Conference Online, or PACO. The event was sponsored by the Pantheon Foundation, which also serves as fiscal sponsor for The Wild Hunt, and included a total of nine sessions on how activism fits into Pagan lives. Having been given a press pass to the conference and experiencing some of the sessions firsthand, I’ve elected to depart from my usual style of journalistic third person, and write about what I learned at the conference, as well as pull together reactions from other people. These conversations bring us closer together as a community, even though we’re only coming together in virtual space. #PACO #RITEAction

— Rhiannon (@GypsyMamaRhi) November 24, 2014
On a technical level, the conference was a success.

Culture and Community: The Impact of Real Name Policies in Paganism

[Crystal Blanton is one of our talented monthly columnists. If you like her work and want to support her writing here at The Wild Hunt, please consider donating to our fall funding drive and sharing our IndieGoGo link. It is your continued support that had made it possible for us to feature Crystal and her insightful column, Culture and Community, each month. Will you donate now? Thank you.]

Facebook’s “real name” policy has caused a recent storm of responses from many social media consumers, increasing the number of people who have started the process in taking their social media loyalty someplace else.

Column: Voting Rights Act, Independence Day, and the Pagan Response

Today, July 4th, is Independence Day in the United States, the nationally celebrated mark of freedom in this country from the Kingdom of Great Britain. On this day in 1776, the Declaration of Independence was adopted and we begun a history of celebration of freedom, an ideal of freedom. Recent Supreme Court rulings bring many questions to the forefront about that ideal of freedom, and the idea that the United States has a history of writing social policy that does not actually equate to freedom for the ethnic minorities within this country. Slavery was still a legal institution here while we simultaneously adopted the declaration and celebrated freedom for Americans. Since the Declaration of Independence, and other such policies, did not give freedoms and rights to African Americans, what social and government policies did? And how important are those today?