Paganism

Guest Post: Air Force Adds Asatru and Heathen to Religious Preference List

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[The following is a guest post from Josh Heath. Josh Heath is the Co-Director of The Open Halls Project, a military Heathen outreach and advocacy program, with his wife Cat. Both are world travelers and highly invested in the Heathen community at large. Josh is a few weeks away from beginning a Master’s program in International Peace and Conflict resolution at American University in Washington, D.C.]

“He was a very moral man… but not what you’d call a spiritual person,” Master Sergeant (Msgt) Matt Walters said, referring to his father during our discussion about the additions of Asatru and Heathen to the religious preference list for the US Air Force. Msgt Walters and I talked for nearly an hour about his pathway to Heathenry, and the complex process he had to dredge through to update the Air Force system.

News

Dan Halloran Convicted of Fraud and Bribery

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Former New York City Councilman Dan Halloran was convicted Tuesday on corruption and bribery charges. The jury deliberated for just under an hour and a half to return a guilty verdict on all five counts. Halloran was the highest elected official in the US who is openly an adherent of a Pagan or Heathen religion. In September 2012, Halloran, along with state Democratic Senate majority leader Malcolm Smith and ex-Queens Republican Party leader Vincent Tabone, was the focus of an FBI sting operation. He was recorded taking payoffs to facilitate a plot to get Smith, a Democrat, on the GOP line for the 2013 New York City mayoral race.

Paganism

Column: Heathen Tongues

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The page looks like something out of The Shining: line after line of the same eight words repeating endlessly, with errors as the only variation. Hestur. Hest. Hesti. Hests.

Paganism

Column: Alone in the Garden

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St. Louis summer: not just hot, but humid, sticky, “muggy,” as we, the low-born of the south side, tend to call it. The world seems to glow orange under the proud gaze of Father Sun. On August days like this, sometimes the death of the Sun King doesn’t seem so tragic after all. He has it coming.

Paganism

Column: Dedicant

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The first time I heard about Odin – really heard, or perhaps really listened – I was listening to Alaric Albertsson speak. That was never what I called him, then or now; he is, and always will be, my uncle Alaric, the person my god-brother was named after, one of the many people who had known me since the day I was born. I was eighteen years old at that time, attending a Pagan festival on my own for the first time. It had been some years since I had last seen Alaric, and his path had evolved in that time. He had embraced something he called “Fyrn Sedu,” or “the Old Ways,” an Anglo-Saxon form of Heathenry.