I’ve mentioned this a few places – for around a year I’ve been working on an article for a forthcoming issue of Witches & Pagans on modern polytheism. Well, the article finally got done and now the issue is preparing for release. It will be for sale in stores in June though you can pre-order it now and get it in your mailbox. You can also get electronic editions for just a few dollars once the paper version is released.

The article was a challenging bit of writing in lots of ways, not the least because I’m thoroughly saturated in academic material and unless I’m writing ad copy I’m writing some pretty high-level stuff; this means that I had to bring down my tone to a more general level. This was a very needful challenge and I feel like I made good progress through the editing process. The result is an article very different from the first one I wrote; I’m not sure I would have written the final article had it not been for the input I received from the editor. Simply writing something that I would have never written otherwise is an interesting experience – or rather, it’s not one that I’ve had since college I suppose.

In a way, the polytheism article is not the way I would necessarily talk about these subjects in another venue. I don’t mean that the article is inauthentic, just different. It’s an ambivalent experience, to be sure. That said, I feel like I got across my basic points: that religious relationships are real; these relationships are based in the actual experiences of practitioners; that diversity can be regarded as a fundamental feature of a polytheist worldview; and that fundamentalism is a threat to this diversity.

So hopefully it doesn’t suck. It’d be cool if you bought a copy.