"True to the Earth" my upcoming book!

My forthcoming book from Gods and Radicals just went up for pre-sale! I am very excited about this and can't wait to hear what any of you think. Please consider checking it out, it is discounted until the official release on October 15th.

 from 12.50

190 pages, perfect bound, matte cover, B&W text.

Much more than traditions and customs are lost when an animist culture is suppressed or destroyed. Into the abyss of forgetting goes also an entire way of seeing humans, animals, gods, and the rest of nature, as well as the relationships these things constantly forge with each other.

These were also the worldviews of ancient Pagan cultures before the dominance of writing and monotheism supplanted them. Organic pluralism, an embrace of multiple, conflicting truths, and a deep understanding of the interconnection between humans and the natural world: all were core values of oral and animist cultures.

As global climate change and the collapse of Empire throw the earth and our modern societies into crisis, these core values are what humanity and the nature it destroys desperately need again.

In True To The Earth: Pagan Political Theology, author and professor of philosophy Kadmus weaves a narrative from the lore of Celtic, Greek, Norse, and indigenous traditions to show us how we once saw the world and how we can see it again. He unveils the modern assumptions which blind us from seeing the past and what we've lost, challenges the core foundations of literal, universalist thinking, and shakes us free from the unseen bonds monotheism has placed upon our understanding of ourselves and the world.

Well-researched and erudite, yet written in an engaging and accessible manner, True To The Earth offers back to us what we have lost, and gives us fertile soil from which a new earth-centered political understanding can arise.

https://abeautifulresistance.org/shop-1/true-to-the-earth-pagan-political-theology-by-kadmus

A Paganism and Politics Trilogy

 I have just published a new piece over at Gods and Radicals entitled "Nature's Rights". In it I attempt to craft a pagan view of natural rights and address several deep problems and failings that the history of rights theory has faced and, mostly, failed to solve. I've now published three pieces with them on, generally, the implications of pagan metaphysics for politics and one book review (another is on its way soon and I am very excited for it).

What I realize in retrospect, though it wasn't planned, is that my first three pieces form a sort of natural trilogy.

Gods and Radicals: Towards a Pagan Politics

I recently published an essay entitled "Towards a Pagan Politics" over at the excellent new pagan website Gods and Radicals. You should consider checking out both the site and the essay if you are interested. I will be publishing pieces with them consistently, probably one about every month or so.

I do hope you will read the full essay, which includes reflections on Ancient Greece and Rome as well as aspects of Akan culture amongst many other elements, but I will include the concluding segment here. It attempts to sketch the basic elements of a pagan politics and I would be interested in discussing any or all of it:

A Pagan Metaphysics might Assert that:

1. Reality is irreducibly multiple, made up of numerous different forces. In other words, truth and reality are always plural.
2. Insofar as these truths are irreducible there is no one final truth or god and conflict (whether constructive or destructive, whether play or war) is an unavoidable aspect of reality.
3. There is no one right way to live, best culture, highest value or single purpose.
4. Wisdom consists in a gathering of diverse truths beyond that attainable by any one individual, “Wisdom does not reside in one head.”

A Pagan Politics might be Committed to:

1. The rejection of all totalizing claims and authorities.
2. The promotion of productive rather than negative conflict (play over war) and an increase in different ways of life.
3. The commitment to creating an environment where each way of life can reach its fullest most creative form as far as is possible, thus rejecting the Roman model of one type of power ruling over all others.
4. The insistence that no one standard of evaluation can be applied to all things.
5. The recognition that most things should not be characterized in terms of monetary value and so the resistance to the reduction of all values to market values.
6. In a World Without Council, i.e. one already under the domination of one reductive way of life, pagan politics would be committed to the pursuit of the actions necessary to make pluralism possible.