Blog

Celebrating Women’s History Month: A Reading List

| Future,Past,Present

In celebration of Women’s History Month, we offer here an updated list of our blog posts about women,  goddesses, goddess worship and female imagery. Enjoy! Posts since late March 2021: Rounding Out Women’s History Month: Current Women Leaders around the World Current Research on Pompeii, Part I: Archaeology Current Research on Pompeii, Part II: Paul’s […]

The Reduced US Child Tax Credit: Paltry and Shameful

| Present

The site VERIFYthis.com, whose mission is to “provide trustworthy, transparent information to prove or disprove” stories or claims, gives us the bad news for American families regarding the Child Tax Credit: “The American Rescue Plan only expanded the child tax credit for the 2021 tax year. That means the credit has returned to its pre-pandemic […]

The Cult of the Thracian Horseman in the Early Christian Era

| Past

As we have seen in past posts, the early Jesus movement – which ultimately became Christianity – originated in a polytheistic environment: people of the Roman Empire worshiped multiple female and male deities. This means that Jesus himself, his earliest followers and those who later identified as Christians lived and worked among devotees of Aphrodite/Venus, […]

Resources and Some Good News For Black History Month 2023

| Present

There are movements afoot in our country – by those on the political right, including many elected officials at all levels of government – to reverse social, racial and economic progress that most Americans acknowledge has been made over the past 40-50 years. “Progress,” however, is not how those Americans on the right characterize certain […]

Guardian Angels: With Us, Helping Us

| Future

In the Roman Catholic tradition, there is a simple and common prayer to one’s Guardian Angel: Angel of God My guardian dear To Whom His love Commits me here Ever this day Be at my side To light and guard To rule and guide. Amen The paranormal evidence supports the existence of guardian angels for […]

Praying the Psalms: Age-Old Jewish Poetry in a Christian Context

| Past,Present

Most Sundays, and in many contexts around the world on weekdays as well, Christian worshipers read, sing or chant portions of a Psalm, an entire Psalm or even several Psalms during a service. The standard collection of Psalms, the Psalter, found in the Hebrew Scriptures (Old Testament) portion of the Bible, is “an anthology of […]

The New Democratic Progressive Caucus

| Present

One of the most significant results of the 2022 midterms was the election, across the country, of the “most progressive Democratic Caucus in decades.” With wins of almost all of the 18 candidates supported by the Democratic Progressive Caucus (DPC), the DPC will now have 103 members in the 118th Congress (Senator Bernie Sanders [VT] […]

The Apocryphal Origins of the Cherry Tree Carol

| Past

Tis the season when many of us are singing – and/or listening to – Christmas carols. These carols often  reflect the stories of Jesus’ birth as recounted in the New (Christian) Testament Gospels of Matthew and Luke, but many others originate considerably later in the Christian tradition. One of these later tales is the Cherry […]

Kabbalah and the Paranormal: Parallels around Consciousness

| Future

The mystical component of Judaism, often referred to as Kabbalah, is relatively little known to modern Westerners. Although developed during the Middle Ages, Kabbalah’s 20th-century practitioners who would have been able to carry on the tradition nearly all perished in the Holocaust (Cooper, 13). It is possible that up to 80 percent of religiously observant […]

Post-Election Musings

| Present

Election Day 2022 – the midterms – is now history, although many votes are still being counted. Fortunately, casting ballots across our country generally appears to have gone quite smoothly (although some voters did experience intimidation in some areas). Given the fact that the Georgia Senate election will go into a runoff and the long […]