- Pagan Studies, Paganism, Neo-Paganism and Western Esotericism, Pagan Theology, Neo-Paganism, contemporary Paganism, and 12 moreJungian psychology, Carl G. Jung, Jungian and post-Jungian psychology, Jung, Carl Gustav Jung, Jungian psychology (Religion), Ancient myth and religion, Myth And Ritual Studies, Liturgics, Comparative mythology, History of Religion, Consciousness and Creativity, and Octavia Butleredit
- John Halstead is an attorney living in Northwest Indiana, near Chicago, with his wife and two teenage children. John has spent most of his life in the southern Laurentian bioregion, commonly known as the Midwest and Appalachia. He was raised Mormon (LDS), served a proselytizing mission for the L... moreJohn Halstead is an attorney living in Northwest Indiana, near Chicago, with his wife and two teenage children.
John has spent most of his life in the southern Laurentian bioregion, commonly known as the Midwest and Appalachia. He was raised Mormon (LDS), served a proselytizing mission for the LDS Church in northeast Brazil from 1994 to 1996, and attended Brigham Young University. John and his wife were married in the Manti, Utah temple in 1997. John graduated cum laude and with University Honors from Brigham Young University in 1999 with a double major in sociocultural anthropology and political science. His Honor's Thesis explored cultural boundary maintenance in a small Mormon community which was previously divided by the emergence of an apostate Mormon faction.
John graduated magna cum laude from Indiana University-Bloomington School of Law in 2002. He served as the director of the Protective Order Project, which obtained protective orders for victims of domestic violence. John interned with the U.S. District Attorney's Office for the Western District of Kentucky and the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Indiana. He then clerked for the Allen County Superior Court in Fort Wayne, Indiana. John currently practices civil defense trial law in Northwest Indiana. Together with his wife, who is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, John co-authored "Legal Issues in Couple and Family Therapy" in Ethics and Professional Issues in Couple and Family Therapy, ed. L. Hecker.
John is a Pagan and Unitarian Universalist. He formally withdrew from the LDS Church in 2001 and began identifying as Pagan in 2003. John began attending a Unitarian church in 2010 and joined in 2015. He and his Mormon wife are raising their atheist son and label-adverse daughter in an intentionally interfaith home. John crafts Pagan and interfaith rituals for his family and practices an idiosyncratic and eclectic form of Neo-Paganism personally which draws on the archetypal psychology of Carl Jung and the naturalistic animism of David Abram.
John (affectionally known as "Johnny Humanist" by some of his detractors) is the former Managing Editor at HumanisticPaganism.com, a community blog for Naturalistic Pagans, to which he is also a frequent contributor. John is now the Editor-at-Large at HP and writes/curates a regular column called "The Naturalistic Pagan Toolbox."
John writes for numerous other online platforms, including The Huffington Post, Patheos, GodsandRadicals.org, Witches & Pagans, and GodisChange.org.
Since 2011, John has been writing about his often ambivalent relationship with Paganism at AllergicPagan.com, which is currently hosted by the interfaith platform Patheos. There, you can find his series on eco-Paganism, as well a description of his popular "Three Centers of Paganism" model, which is an alternative to the "umbrella model" and which describes the contemporary Pagan community, not as one, but as three overlapping circles of earth-centered, deity-centered, and Self-centric Pagans.
John also writes about the intersection of Jungian psychology and Neo-Paganism at “Dreaming the Myth Onward,” which is hosted by Witches & Pagans. He is working on a book by the same name.
John is the creator and curator of the informational site Neo-Paganism.com/Neo-Paganism.org.
John edited and contributed to the anthology, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans, which gathers the writings of 40 atheistic, humanistic, and naturalistic Pagans, pantheists, animists, Gaians, and other non-theistic Pagans.
John was the principal facilitator of “A Pagan Community Statement on the Environment,” which can be found at ecopagan.com. The Statement has now collected over 7,500 signatures from over 80 countries, has been translated into 16 languages, and represents the most successful effort to date to harmonize the diverse voices of the Pagan community in defense of the Earth and the web of life. Click here to add your name.
John has presented at numerous conferences, including the Parliament of the World’s Religions, the Greening of Religions conference, PantheaCon, and (with his wife) the Sunstone Symposium.
John is also a Shaper of the fledgling Earthseed community, which was inspired by Octavia Butler's science fiction novels Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, and which is described in detail at GodisChange.org.
John is concerned with the intersections of environmental activism, interfaith, theology, and ritual. John's interests include anti-capitalism, deep ecology, ecofeminism, ecopsychology, embodiment, reenchantment, the Epic of Evolution, Gaia theory, the Great Turning, Jungian psychology, mythology, nature religion, Neo-Paganism, new animism, pantheism, post-theism, practical theism, process theology, Religious Naturalism, theology, theopoetics, ritual as an art form, and getting your hands dirty as a spiritual practice.edit
Pope Francis' environmental encyclical and the Pagan Community Statement on the Environment are evidence of how Christians and Pagans can arrive at the same place by different paths. In the encyclical, Pope Francis writes that religions... more
Pope Francis' environmental encyclical and the Pagan Community Statement on the Environment are evidence of how Christians and Pagans can arrive at the same place by different paths. In the encyclical, Pope Francis writes that religions should be spurred "to dialogue among themselves for the sake of protecting nature.". The similarities between the encyclical and the Pagan statement may inspire Christians and Pagan to work together to transform our relationship with the earth. And yet, there is a place for in interfaith dialogue to talk about our differences. It is possible to learn from our differences as much as our similarities. We lose out on the opportunity when we only talk about what we have in common.
Research Interests:
Paganism, like every religion, is a complex mixture of concepts that can be used to either rationalize environmental neglect or encourage ecological harmony. Rather than characterizing Paganism, or any other religion, as “green” or “not... more
Paganism, like every religion, is a complex mixture of concepts that can be used to either rationalize environmental neglect or encourage ecological harmony. Rather than characterizing Paganism, or any other religion, as “green” or “not green,” we might rather speak about the “greening of religions,” an ongoing, never-to-be-complete process. In this way, we can understand the history of contemporary Paganism as a “greening,” one that is still going on, and A Pagan Community Statement on the Environment, as one small but valuable part of that process.
Research Interests:
Unitarian-Universalism and Mormonism differ in myriad ways. Mormonism obviously has much further to go toward embracing an ecological paradigm. There are some untapped resources in Mormonism which could be used to facilitate this shift,... more
Unitarian-Universalism and Mormonism differ in myriad ways. Mormonism obviously has much further to go toward embracing an ecological paradigm. There are some untapped resources in Mormonism which could be used to facilitate this shift, including Joseph Smith’s vitalist teachings and the Word of Wisdom advice to eat meat sparingly. However, there are major obstacles as well, some of which may be insurmountable, including Mormonism’s inherent anthropocentrism and doctrines and teachings that promote unrestricted childbirth. For their part, UUs still have work to do as well. While UUs are perhaps the most environmentally concerned of any religious group, it is also true that they are among most concerned about every other social issue of the day. The sheer number of worthy causes may contribute to diminishing the resources which are available to UUs to work against what is shaping up to be a global ecological catastrophe.
Research Interests: Environmental Studies, Mormon, Mormonism, Unitarian Universalist History, Environmental Activism, and 12 moreUnitarian Theology, Mormon History, Environmentalism, Unitarianism, Mormon studies, Mormon Apologetics, Mormon Theology;, Unitarian Universalist Thought., Mormonism (58), Unitarian Universalist Studies, Transylvanian Unitarians, and Unitarian history
Many Pagans and scholars of Paganism presume that Paganism is and always has been an earth-centered religion. But this claim needs to be interrogated closely by academics and participants alike to determine whether and to what extent... more
Many Pagans and scholars of Paganism presume that Paganism is and always has been an earth-centered religion. But this claim needs to be interrogated closely by academics and participants alike to determine whether and to what extent Pagan beliefs and practices are actually earth-centered.
