colonialism – Alison Leigh Lilly

Adaptation of "Tea Cup," by Dory Kornfeld (CC)

Q&A: Are the gods immortal? (Are we?)

April 9, 2015September 23, 2019 Alison Leigh Lilly

The bleakness of Douglas Adams' novel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, is its critique of our willingness to treat the gods like vending machines, here to serve our needs. The god who can't serve us is as useless and incomprehensible to us as a Coke machine with an "Out of Order" sign taped to it. It's no coincidence that Adams portrays the gods as vagabonds who have to sleep in an abandoned train station, while the villains of the book are comfortably middle-class characters who use money to buy the luxury of ignoring "all the mess." Does mortality offer the gods a way out?

Holy Wild, justice, Science & Civilization

Q&A: What will Druidry look like on Mars?

March 31, 2015September 23, 2019 Alison Leigh Lilly

Jeff asks, "With recent discussions in the news about human beings one day traveling to Mars and setting up colonies there, I was wondering: What would Druidry on Mars look like?" Can you even do Druidry in space? One of the lessons that Druidry teaches is that every apparently empty "space" is already a place even before we arrive, brimming with its own qualities and communities that will inevitably draw us into relationship and change us. If the Star Trek: Original Series declaration to boldly go "where no man has gone before" is overtly sexist, the Next Generation's revision to go "where no one has gone before" is equally problematic...