Presentations and Travel

I thought I'd put up a brief post that touches on my recent speaking activities, an upcoming workshop, and travel for next month.

Readers of this blog might recall that I had an opportunity to speak at the Utah Summer Spirit Fest hosted by Eagles Kindred in July in Utah. I presented a few of my thoughts about Pagan-Christian engagement and how our two communities need to engage in hospitality and dialogue. This was well received and it led to an invitation to speak at Pagan Pride Day in Murray near Salt Lake City last Saturday. I spoke before a small group and talked about my participation and research into Burning Man Festival and what I learned with application to the Christian community. This even also gave me an opportunity to meet a few new Pagans, and to make flyers available promoting our forthcoming book Beyond the Burning Times: A Pagan and Christian in Dialogue (Lion, 2007).

This Friday I present the first of two workshops on interreligious dialogue with application to Evangelical-Mormon dialogue at Salt Lake Theological Seminary in connection with Standing Together's National Student Dialogue Conference. I hope that local readers will consider sitting in on this workshop and attending the conference. The syllabus for my workshop is available via email by request.

Next month I am looking forward to a bit of travel that combines research interests and pleasure. I am using some frequent flyer miles set to expire at year's end in order to visit my friend Phil Wyman of The Gathering in Salem, MA. I am looking forward to seeing what Phil is doing in Salem, to meeting some local Pagans, Wiccans, and vampires, and given that the Halloween season and tourism is in the process of gearing up in this location I am looking forward to some historical research on the witch-hunts as well as seeing how the Halloween holiday is celebrated in this infamous city. Look for future posts on these topics here in the future.