May 2022 Newsletter
Happy Memorial Day and happy start of the summer season! Imagine me writing this newsletter as I lounge poolside or even on a tropic beach somewhere. That mental image isn’t at all accurate, but doesn’t it just seem so wonderful?
At any rate, the month of May has been busy and this newsletter is full of links to tweet and videos. But before we get into that, let’s share a few thoughts.
Summer Thoughts
Here in the Northern Hemisphere, the brighter half of the year has begun. May Day has come and gone, and we have celebrated the start of the fertile season. We may begin new endeavors as the summer solstice approaches and work hard to encourage new growth and renewed strength.
But let’s not forget the lessons we have learned over the dark, colder months either. During those months, we gained the rest we need to sustain this new burst of activity. And hopefully, we’ve considered carefully how to best guide our endeavors. After all, effort without a plan leads to inconsistent outcomes at best. So be sure to remember the lessons of counsel of our time of quiet contemplation from which we developed our will that we now seek to exercise.
Thoughts on Mike Harvey, Nazis, and Cowardly Progressive Christians
To make things easier, I work on this newsletter throughout the month, then send it out at the end. No part of this month’s newsletter has been rewritten more than my thoughts about the terrible way in which Mike Harvey was tweeted. It started out as me simply mentioning his thread and my follow-up thread where I defended his original statements. Now, nearly four weeks later, it deserves its own section.
For those of you who are not aware, Mike Harvey is a Jewish man and a trained and licensed rabbi, though he has walked away from the title of rabbi because of the events of late April and May. It all started when he tweeted briefly that he was tired of Christians asking him and other Jews what they thought about Jesus. Jews don’t think about Jesus much, and Harvey refered to Jesus as a “dead and false messiah.” This created a great deal of outrage among many Christians, which made sense to me. In my own thread, I pointed out that this is a pretty standard belief among Jews. After all, the criteria for a messiah are very clear in Judaism and Jesus did not those criteria. So from a Jewish perspective, this absolutely makes Jesus a failed or false messiah. As for the belief that Jesus is dead, do Christians really expect non-Christians to accept the Resurrection as literal truth? We have no reason too, no matter what Christian apologists insist.
But the outrage continued. Eventually literal Nazis began to find Mike’s account. They began to harass him and even make death threats. They contacted both his employer and the original publisher of his book, Fortress Press. Mike eventually ended up leaving social media (his Twitter account exists, but he has taken it private and has mostly gone quiet) and quitting his job. After that, Fortress Press decided that they didn’t want to deal with the “controversy” and terminated his book contract. Let me say that I find Fortress’s decision to be cowardly and unjust. This is just another example why non-Christians — especially Jews — are and should be wary of even “progressive” Christians.
The good news is that the independent Jewish publisher Ben Yehuda Press has announced that they are in the process of picking up Mike’s book and they plan to start taking pre-orders in the next week, assuming they have not started to do so before this newsletter goes out. (I’m currently rewriting this on 28 May, so who knows what will happen in the three days remaining in this month.)
I’m grateful that Ben Yehuda Press has picked up Mike’s book because I’ve been looking forward to reading it for at least a month now. However, I’m disappointed that no Christian publishers stepped forward to do so. Mike’s book was written for Christian readers with the intent of engaging in interfaith dialogue and I feel that a Christian publisher brave enough to face down the fascist elements of their own religion would have been a strong endorsement of the book. It also would have likely gotten more Christians aware of the book.
To help offset this, I’m encouraging all of my friends and acquaintances to read and promote this book. Especially those of you who are Christian. Your fellow Christians are sadly more likely to take your recommendation over that of Ben Yehuda Press or even my own. So please, use your Christian privilege to support an incredible man who has faced far too much injustice and terribleness.Heard on the Air
The second week of May saw me as a guest on the Thereafter podcast, hosted by Meghan Crozier and Cortland Coffey. We had recorded the interview at the end of April for release in May. Meghan and Cortland were delightful hosts and thoughtful interviewers. I enjoyed the chance to share my thoughts with their listeners. You can check out the interview here. I also tweeted a few thoughts while listening to the episode today.
YouTube Videos Released in May
I started out May with a brief video tackling the idea that witchcraft isn’t “political.” I felt that this was a necessity, given the leaked draft of the SCOTUS ruling overturning Roe v. Wade. I used to believe in “apolitical witchcraft,” but I’ve since realized that there’s no such thing as being apolitical in general. So of course witchcraft is political.
May also saw my second live YouTube event. This time, I took to a live stream to talk about witchcraft, religion, and the intersection between the two. As always, the recording is available on my YouTube channel.
After the live event, I decided to do a video on constructing a bindrune. It was one of my most involved videos, as I decided to include animations to show different ways to combine the individual runes. It was fun to do and I hope to try similar things in the future, but I will definitely have to look into setting aside enough time for such endeavors.
Tweets and Twitter Threads Posted in May
My friend Meghan Crozier tweeted a thread about her struggles with whether and how to engage with people with harmful views. I had a few thoughts on the topic and shared them in a thread of my own.
Christian preacher Owen Strachan decided to defend Young Earth Creationism, and I decided to respond. I stand by my stance: of all the things that Owen Strachan has said, I find his support for a literal six day creation story to be the least morally reprehensible. But even that is not without criticism. After all, a literal interpretation of the creation story is how many non-affirming Christains justify their anti-LGBT positions. Which just makes it much more delcious to learn that some streams of Jewish thought suggest that the accounts in Genesis 1 and 2 actually suggest the first human was intersex.
A report about sex abuse and cover-ups within the Southern Baptist denomination came out this month. I didn’t have a lot to say about it, but I made a few different observations.
I wrote a thread about Christian supremacy and how hard — possibly even impossible — I think it is for Christians to divest themselves of it.
TikTok Videos Released in May
I have to say that I’m really enjoying posting videos on TikTok. They also seem to be getting much more traction than my YouTube channel, which I have complex feelings about. TikTok is nice for a “quick thought,” but YouTube is where I can really take the time and space to explore an idea more thoroughly. The fact that the former seems far more popular than the later is a bit concerning to me. At any rate, here’s a list of my TikTok videos organized by week. Or click on the link embedded in each week and watch a compilation of that week’s videos on YouTube. (Note: the videos from May 29 through May 31 won’t be uploaded to YouTube until the end of the week, which is June 4.)
New witches: Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. (Sorry. The audio on this one is awful.)
Spells are not recipes. (First video with my new lavalier microphone!)
New: Event Calendar
Thanks to a recommendation by a Twitter user (I’d link their account, but they’re on private), i have created an event calendar on Google. I will post YouTube live events, planned releases of this newsletter, and any other noteworthy activities there. It’s just another way for you to keep track of what’s going on in the world of this wyrd-worker.
Upcoming: Ask the Wyrd-Worker Live Event
Don’t forget that I have a live YouTube event coming up on June 8 where I will be answering viewers questions! I am accepting questions ahead of time via email and direct messages on Twitter. I look forward to receiving your questions and hope to see you on the eighth.
Thanks for Reading!
That covers the month of May! If you haven’t done so, please consider using the buttons below to subscribe to this newsletter and share it with your friends. See you at the end of June!