Hearthside

If you have been a Heathen for any length of time you probably are familiar with the concept of guilt culture vs. shame culture. The argument is that Christianity is a guilt culture, which means people internalize and self-regulate their behaviours based on whether or not they think they are living up to the standards of the broader community. (Even if their own assessment of this is not true.) The downfall of this is if you have any level of perfectionism or anxiety then you are beating yourself up a lot unnecessarily for things that everyone else probably doesn’t care about. Heathenry by contrast, is a shame culture, which means we rely on our community to tell us if we have misstepped and how to correct it. On the surface, you may think of public shaming as someone in stocks, getting rotten tomatoes thrown at them and this may seem unappealing. However, this is not how it is meant to be. The idea of shame culture is that it actually allows the individual a lot of extra freedom becau...

(Part 2) If you made it through Part 1 and came back, congrats. It was a tough slog. If you haven’t read Part 1 yet, I suggest you start there , and come back. This is the tougher of 2 parts, certainly the toughest for me to write, and reading my previous post will help lay the groundwork for understanding where I am coming from.  I want to open this part very clearly with the statement that racism is not acceptable, and we should not tolerate it in any aspects of our lives. We should definitely not tolerate it in modern inclusive Heathenry. I want to say we shouldn’t tolerate it in modern Heathenry at all, but since modern Heathenry grew out of white nationalist sentiments that ship has sailed. Rather, we must work to uplift inclusive Heathenry, because the reality is that the majority of modern Heathens today are inclusive Heathens and that number continues to grow rapidly. To me, racists aren’t Heathen. No fascism, not in my Heathenry. But ignoring history never goes well either...