I am currently working on a book. It is combining a number of open projects and loose threads that have collected dust over the years. It will represent my most mature and considered thoughts on what Paganism is and what it’s place is in today’s world.

Those of you who have followed my writings over the years probably know me as a defender of Paganism, and of polytheism specifically. I have been a polemicist, an apologist, an activist. For so long I have sought to exonerate these ideas, to secure space and respect for our communities, to break the foothold of their their detractors and put them on the defensive.

In so doing, I have helped legitimize the accusations, by illicitly conceding our views needed to be defended — though my intention was of course only to show that they didn’t. But this will be a work of an entirely different sort.

I wonder if part of this is due to being a first-generation Pagan. Perhaps I sought validation, or revenge.

While I don’t know that I’ll ever come to bow out of debate or dialogue, my heart is in a different place. What I want to do, and what I suppose I’ve always wanted to do, is build something for our community that lasts. But I’ve been trying to do that by looking outside of our community. For academic approval. For ecumenical collaboration. By staying relevant.

But why should being relevant to others matter to us, and how long would it last anyway?

I hope this next book will make up for lost time. I hope it will give our successors something to hang on to, and build off of.

So, here’s what you can expect (whether you’re looking forward to it or not):

In Paganism: A Theory, I’m going to present a vision of things according to which there is a sense of the term in which it is the world that is “pagan,” primarily, rather than people.

To this vision,

1. There is a grand totality of all things,
2. There could not be any determinate number of ways for them to form this totality, and
3. Each way of doing so is divine, or an appropriate object of worship or religious attitude.

Plurality and divinity are written into the very fabric of reality.

Thus, religious traditions are not competing for the correct account of cosmic origin. They are not incompatible claims about what exists and how it got here. Saying they’re all true does not mean truth is relative, or that our world is causally overdetermined.

Rather, they are each expressions of their unifying principle and everything from its perspective.

The world is what is “pagan,” no matter what people are up to in any given age.

Rather than belonging to some particular branch of religious belief, to be “pagan,” in this sense, is to be open, unrestricted, and embracing of the diversity that traces back to the foundations of reality itself. Paganism is so much bigger on this view than this or that type of religion. It’s not an “alternative” religion to, say, Christianity or Islam. It is a meta-religious view, a global, or cosmic perspective.

My hope is that by sharing such a vision, others can catch a glimpse of it too, and allow it to grow into the deep and abiding sense of wholeness and connection with all things that I’ve come to know.

I hope it can restore a sense of unity, wonder, and enchantment for others, and enrich our connections and bonds as devotees of different Holy Ones.

Here’s to hoping!