Via the Wild Hunt:

Patheos.com, a web site dedicated to religious and spiritual dialog, has been running a special series this Summer looking at the future of religion. Each week focuses on a different religious tradition or movement, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Catholicism, Islam, and several others. This week the focus is on modern Paganism.

Jason Pitzl-Waters spoke with spoke with Star Foster, Patheos.com’s Pagan Portal Manager, who stressed to him how important it is for our communities to consider our collective future(s).

“The Future of Pagan religions is even more fascinating because we’ve never conformed to the future laid out for us. We were saying we would remain a fringe, occult community and now one of the cast members of the most popular cartoon show for the past 20 years has become Wiccan. We were insistent about transmitting information orally or by handcopying and now the internet has made Paganism an open-source community. You can find our classics at your local library. We’re growing and diversifying yet the concept of our future is very hazy to most of us. There are people who have been active in the community for decades who have no idea just how diverse we have become or how much we have grown. It’s safe to say that there are millions of us worldwide. Even if we only number 2 million, that’s still huge compared to 10 years ago. How many of us will there be 10 years from now? How will we respond to and accommodate that growth? How do we enter the mainstream without out losing our dynamic, autonomous qualities?”

Star Foster and Patheos.com have assembled an impressive line-up of modern Pagans from a wide array of faiths, traditions, and perspectives to give their input on the subject. This week will see contributions from scholars like Helen Berger and Sarah Pike, renowned Pagan journalist Margot Adler (check out The Wild Hunt interview), author Christopher Knowles, mystic and ritualist T. Thorn Coyle, and several prominent clergy and leaders, including M. Horatius Picinus, Pontifex Maximus of Nova Roma.

Ms Foster noted that being granted equal standing with the other major world religions on such a well-respected and high traffic website doesn’t happen every day.

For an entire week, the focus of a major religion website will be on US. Wow. I don’t think this has happened before. It’s really kind of mind-blowing when I think about it. We’re being given equal time with Catholics, Mormons, Buddhists and Evangelicals.

Along with reading these extremely interesting and thought-provoking articles, Star Foster invites you to get involved in this special week:

I’m only one person though, and I could really use your help. If you like what we are doing here and you’d like to see us continue to promote thoughtful writers from diverse Pagan backgrounds I’d love it if you would make a small donation of time.

All this week I will be posting links to Facebook and Twitter, and towards the middle of the week I’ll be sending out a new newsletter for the Pagan portal. If you could share my Facebook posts, retweet my tweets and encourage people to sign up for the newsletter this week it would really help to make this series a smashing success, and ensure more interesting Pagan series to come!