The Wild Hunt (https://wildhunt.org/tag/religious-freedom)
This week we bring you: VA police officer with links to the Asatru Folk Assembly placed on administrative paid leave, a temporary temple constructed to honor victims of the Parkland High School shooting, and much more – including Russian Witches, Muslim prison rights, and Furries.
BANGKOK – Most, but certainly not all individuals who follow a Pagan path come to one of the faiths within that umbrella through a different faith. The faith of origin is often Christian for those in nations with close ties to European immigration or colonization. But it is, of course, not exclusively the case. Regardless, the process of abandoning one’s faith of origin and practice to a new faith is formally an act of apostasy. Most of us in the West do not see or even recognize the idea of apostasy as having any serious consequence. Freedom of religion serves as a guarantee that the act of a adopting a new belief or dogma may have personal social consequences like estrangement, but nothing more serious in nature.
TWH – This week we take a look back at a few of the new stories in the mainstream that we covered that had an impact on the collective Pagan, Heathen, and Polytheist communities.
The Parliament of World Religions hosted a larger amount of programming featuring Witches and Pagans than in the past. TWH spoke with four Pagans who planned to attend PoWR to get their perspective and what they hoped to accomplish by attending. After the conference, guest contributor, Karen Dales gave us aa bird’s eye view of some of the activities in her article. As a lead up to PoWR, the Global Wicca Summit cyber conference was held in early September and centered around the theme “Wicca as a Global Faith” with the primary purpose of providing the community with open discussion and worldwide networking.
There are lots of articles and essays of interest to modern Pagans and Heathens out there, more than our team can write about in depth in any given week. Therefore, The Wild Hunt must unleash the hounds in order to round them all up. Religious Freedom and Diversity News
How people around the world define religious freedom can seemingly be at odds. Here are just a few stories from around the web that illustrate just how different those interpretations can be. The Basilica of the National Shrine of Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC joined churches across the globe to bring awareness to the religious persecution of Christians by participating in the “Courage in Red – Stand Up for Faith and Religious Freedom” by bathing parts of the basilica in red light.
WINFIELD, Kan. — On July 23, 2018, nine Ásatrú prisoners in Kansas filed a religious discrimination suit. The named defendants include the Winfield Correctional Facility, the Kansas Department of Corrections, and the Secretary of the Kansas Department of Corrections. The suit also named eight individual guards at the Winfield Correctional Facility. The nine prisoners charged that correctional officers had seized religious and other materials.