Interview with Author Dorothy Morrison
Dorothy Morrison is the author of a number of books on Wicca and Paganism, including the brand new Utterly Wicked. Dorothy was able to take some time out from her busy tour schedules to answer a few questions for About.com.
Health:
Accepting death is difficult for patients and doctors, but it needs to be done
My 64-year-old patient with terminal cancer and less than six months to live wanted to go to Oregon. He was contemplating assisted suicide, which is legal there. “My life has been long and good,” he said. “I believe it is my right. I want the ability to say it’s too much, I can’t do it anymore. A person should have a dignified quality of life.”
Another one of my patients, an 84-year-old woman from a nursing home, had heart failure, lung failure and kidney failure. She lay in her bed on a ventilator and on a dialysis machine with little hope for survival.“We want everything done,” her daughter insisted. “It’s in God’s hands, and God can do miracles.” For weeks we continued aggressive and ultimately futile efforts to keep her alive. Read full story from washingtonpost.com
News:
GOP presidential hopeful courts pagans
Gary Johnson’s unorthodox campaign for the Republican presidential nomination continued Sunday, when he spoke at a Google+ town hall conducted by representatives of various pagan media outlets.
The former New Mexico governor spoke with members of the Pagan Newswire Collective, ModernWitch Podcast and Patheos.com, among others. He said it was important to reach out to voters that fall outside the Christian, Jewish and Muslim faiths, and slammed his own party for being too beholden to the Christian right. Read full story from thehill.com
Religion:
Pastor defends teacher accused of anti-gay rant
UNION, N.J. — The pastor of a high school teacher who has been vilified for an anti-gay tirade on Facebook came to the woman’s defense, calling her a “very loving person” who should not be fired for expressing her religious beliefs.
The Rev. Milton B. Hobbs, pastor of New Covenant Fellowship in Clark, N.J., said special education teacher Viki Knox is not homophobic and that her comments, when taken in the context of the Bible, were not false.
Knox, 49, an ordained minister at the church and a faculty adviser for a student Bible study group, wrote on her Facebook page that homosexuality was a “perverted spirit” and a “sin” that “breeds like cancer.” Read full story from washingtonpost.com
Shamanism: Religion next door to medicine
Shamanism is the national religion in many regions of the Earth, including Yakutia. The ancient belief has survived the Soviet persecution of religion. During those atheist years the Yakut shamans were hiding their abilities. The remaining oyuuns, as they were called by the local population, and Udege (female shamans) soon found a loophole. With a talent for medicine, they found work as medical staff and veterinarians. Hiding under the guise of the Soviet medicine, Yakut shamans secretly conducted their magical rituals. Read full story from pravda.ru
Samhain:
Halloween: Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask
“As far as history goes, it’s supposed to be the eve of All Saints Day,” Thad says. “I think they’re supposed to drive evil spirits away. That’s when they believed all that stuff. We just like to see the little kids dressed up.”
While many people view the Oct. 31 celebration as harmless fun, others express concerned about its origin.
The Encyclopedia Americana says, “Elements of the customs connected with Halloween can be traced to a Druid ceremony in pre-Christian times. The Celts had festivals for two major gods — a sun god (called Lug) and a god of the dead, called Samhain, whose festival was held on Nov. 1, the beginning of the Celtic New Year.” Read full story from clevelandbanner.com
Gary McCullough, director of Christian Newswire, says he is annoyed and bothered by the latest atheist attacks on Christmas and the story of Christ’s birth. He asserts that Christians have already won the culture war by using their principles to “co-opt” rituals and holidays in America and abroad.
“We take them over, we make them our own and we mock their pagan roots,” insisted McCullough. Read full story from christianpost.com
Seneca President Robert Odawi Porter has announced that the nation filed application documents with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Nov. 30 for the license to operate the Seneca Pumped Storage Project at Kinzua Dam.
Seneca will be competing for the permit against the current owner, FirstEnergy Corp. of Akron, Ohio. The current 50-year license to operate the pumped storage project expires in 2015. Read full story from indiancountrytoday.com
He passed away in June, and I know from working with other families that the first holidays after a death are often layered with sadness. Last year, I wrote a column about one of our final conversations with my dad while he was still lucid.
This year, remembering some of what he said has helped us through our grief. As I mourn him, all the things I’ve said to people as a pastor over the years are coming toward me, now. It’s strange and beautiful to be on the receiving end of comfort. Holidays are special markers in communities, large and small: who is still with us, how we have changed, where are we now, who we are becoming. Read full story from gloucestertimes.com
World AIDS Day 2010: Rates of new HIV infections are slowing, but what now?
Scores of cities and communities all over the world will dim the lights this December 1st to mark World AIDS Day as part of the Light for Rights campaign which focuses on human rights, HIV and AIDS.Significant progress has been made in advancing access to HIV prevention, treatment, support and care over the past ten years, but putting human rights approaches at the centre of the response is crucial to further progress. The 2010 Global Update on the AIDS Epidemic by the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) shows that in 2009 the pace of new infections had declined by almost 20% compared to 1999, but still outpaces treatment success by two to one. There are still major gaps in the implementation of human rights commitments at national and regional levels according to the report. For many people living with HIV – and the people most affected by it – human rights can help to guarantee access to health services, work, education and community participation. Read full story from worldaidscampaign.org
December Skies
This month we’ll lead off with news of a spectacular lunar eclipse that will be visible from all of North America during the night of Dec. 20-21. This is going to be a beauty with totality lasting for an hour and 12 minutes. We will be able to see the entire eclipse from beginning to end. Mark your calendars because this won’t happen again for North America until April 2014. Read full story from dchieftain.com
Answers In Genesis, which built and operates the religious-themed attraction, plans to build a full-scale wooden replica of Noah’s Ark based on biblical descriptions. Read full story from wlwt.com
What does it mean to be human?
Calling someone a “Neanderthal” in the heat of an argument may not be such an insult after all. Last May, scientists announced they had completed a draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome, and found evidence that Neanderthals and modern humans interbred, likely sometime 80,000 to 50,000 years ago when modern humans left Africa and ventured into Eurasia — Neanderthal territory. Those encounters left a mark in the modern gene pool: As much as 4 percent of the DNA in people with European or Asian ancestry may be Neanderthal DNA, the researchers reported in Science.
The discovery of our intimate history with Neanderthals received tremendous press last spring, but another implication of the sequencing of the Neanderthal genome also deserves attention, says the study’s lead author, Richard Green, a genome biologist now at the University of California at Santa Cruz. “The hope is to be able to use the Neanderthal [genome] to shine a flashlight on recent evolution in humans,” he says.
Until now, scientists had been limited to comparing human DNA to the DNA of our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. It was impossible to know, however, when any detected difference arose in our evolutionary history: Did it occur right after the split with the chimp lineage (sometime about 8 million years ago), in australopithecines, in other now-extinct species in the genus Homo? Or is it a change only found in Homo sapiens? By comparing our genome to that of Neanderthals, researchers can now look for the genetic changes that make modern humans unique among all hominins. Read full story from earthmagazine.org
Olmecs to Toltecs: Great ancient civilizations of Mexico
It always strikes me when I travel in Mexico how many foreign visitors don’t know the Olmecs from the Toltecs, never mind the Totonacs. Most of what we’ve learned about Mexico’s ancient cultures begins and ends with the Aztecs and the Maya. Those justly renowned civilizations arose relatively late in the country’s history, building on traditions that came before and incorporating influences from other peoples near and far.
Mesoamerica at its height was home to more than 25 million people. The 280 languages still spoken in Mexico today show that despite shared traditions and influences, many distinct civilizations arose because of geography, climate and contact with other cultures. Read full story from sfgate.com
New York Catholics, furious about an atheist-sponsored billboard calling Christmas “a myth,” lashed out with a counter-attack today — a billboard of their own that defends the celebration of the birth of Christ.
The billboard erected by the Catholic League went up near the New York side of the Lincoln Tunnel, at Dyer Avenue and 31st Street, in a bid to offset the anti-Christmas billboard at the tunnel’s New Jersey entrance. Read full story from nypost.com
Seeking to detect mysterious, ultra-high-energy neutrinos from distant regions of space, a team of astronomers used the Moon as part of an innovative telescope system for the search. Their work gave new insight on the possible origin of the elusive subatomic particles and points the way to opening a new view of the Universe in the future. Read full story from redorbit.com
Radiation Rings Hint Universe Was Recycled Over and Over
Most cosmologists trace the birth of the universe to the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. But a new analysis of the relic radiation generated by that explosive event suggests the universe got its start eons earlier and has cycled through myriad episodes of birth and death, with the Big Bang merely the most recent in a series of starting guns.
That startling notion, proposed by theoretical physicist Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford in England and Vahe Gurzadyan of the Yerevan Physics Institute and Yerevan State University in Armenia, goes against the standard theory of cosmology known as inflation.
The researchers base their findings on circular patterns they discovered in the cosmic microwave background, the ubiquitous microwave glow left over from the Big Bang. The circular features indicate that the cosmos itself circles through epochs of endings and beginnings, Penrose and Gurzadyan assert. The researchers describe their controversial findings in an article posted at arXiv.org on November 17. Read full story from wired.com
Sacred run and sacred paddle provide solemn memorial for Massachusetts Natives
BOSTON – “I hope our ancestors regain some of their pride stripped from them here on this island that is now a sewer treatment plant for the City of Boston. I am honored they watched over us,” wrote Annawon Weeden, Wampanoag, who finished a 20-mile sacred paddle Oct. 30 to memorialize the internment of indigenous people on Deer Island in Boston Harbor in 1675 as well as the path they were forced to travel: 12 miles by roads, 20 miles by river to the open sea and then to barren Deer Island.
A cheer went up in the crowd of more than 150 people who had gathered in the meeting hall, the sacred paddlers’ destination, at the Deer Island Wastewater Treatment Facility, when they recognized that Troy Phillips, Nipmuc, had entered the room. “They’re here, they’re here,” was shouted by many for the people knew how dangerous the journey was for all the paddlers and runners and they had already waited several hours later than expected. Read full story from indiancountrytoday.com
Nearly 160 women turned out for two events, the first all-day Women’s Forum, and an evening Women’s Caucus Reception where they decided to make issues affecting women and children a higher national priority.
“I’m so excited about the NCAI Women’s Caucus. Finally our women – the life givers, culture bearers and caregivers of our nations – have a national voice,” said Susan Masten, co-president of Women Empowering Women for Indian Nations, who co-chaired the caucus with NCAI Secretary Juana Majel Dixon. Read full story from indiancountrytoday.com
Bizarre Insects Inspire Unintentionally Surreal Art
In the first half of the last century, a German blacksmith named Alfred Keller began crafting some of the most surrealistic, alien-seeming sculptures the world had ever seen — delicate works which took months to complete. These incredible creations, meticulous in detail, rivaled even the most imaginative pieces from contemporary artists — but they weren’t inspired by some absinth-induced vision or fit of madness. Indeed, Keller’s muse was nature itself — and these bugs are quite real.
As an employee of Berlin’s Natural History Museum, Keller was charged with creating lifelike models of insects to be placed on display — a challenge he took very, very seriously. The master artisan worked tirelessly fashioning his creepy, crawly creations from common materials, producing breathtaking works that did incredible justice to the real thing. Read full story from treehugger.com
The exhibition also includes a never before seen portrait of the author alongside belongings and literary work from her family – one of Britain’s most renowned literary dynasties. Read full story from dailymail.co.uk
