Pagan Content on Patheos: John Muir was Pagan??
USA Today's religion blogger, Cathy Lynn Gross, visits the Patheos religion web site and discovers (shock!) that it has a Pagan portal with actual Pagan content.
The article that catches her attention is "John Muir was a Pagan."
I admire John Muir, but I do not see him as a capital-P Pagan, follower of a non-monotheistic religion. He might well have been a small-P "pagan"-- a non-Christian, a pantheist.
Get over to Patheos and stir things up before they shut it down. I wonder if starting a religion portal in the midst of a recession was a good business plan -- were the Brunnicks counting on people to turn to religion when their money ran out? They laid off the Pagan gateway manager, a graduate student in religion, a couple of months ago.
The article that catches her attention is "John Muir was a Pagan."
I admire John Muir, but I do not see him as a capital-P Pagan, follower of a non-monotheistic religion. He might well have been a small-P "pagan"-- a non-Christian, a pantheist.
Get over to Patheos and stir things up before they shut it down. I wonder if starting a religion portal in the midst of a recession was a good business plan -- were the Brunnicks counting on people to turn to religion when their money ran out? They laid off the Pagan gateway manager, a graduate student in religion, a couple of months ago.
Labels: American religion, Paganism
posted by Chas S. Clifton at 5:18 PM Permalink
2 Comments:
My opinion:
Growing up in the SF Bay Area of California (he lived in Martinez, a few miles across the Carquinez Straits from my hometown after he got married), John Muir was very, very much a local environmental "hero." His name conjured landmark places like Yosemite and important organizations like the Sierra Club and crucial issues like preserving the land from unrestrained exploitation. (Logging the redwoods and the spread of nuclear power are what grabbed me as a teen ager.)
Muir certainly possessed a spiritual love for the land, and he communicated it lastingly across generations. My own--and heartfelt--roots in the land owe something to Muir's well-articulated love of it.
But nobody I knew, including a few Muir scholars, (nor anything that I've read) suggested that Muir was a "Pagan" of any sort. Looking back, we might see small "P" pagan influences. But not Paganism as we've come to practice it these days.
Thanks for the link. It looks like it has lots of potential.
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