John Halstead

John Halstead edited and contributed to the anthology, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans, which gathered the writings of 40 atheistic, humanistic, and naturalistic Pagans, pantheists, animists, Gaians, and other non-theistic Pagans.

John is the former Managing Editor at HumanisticPaganism.com, a community blog for Naturalistic Pagans, to which he is also a frequent contributor. He is now the Editor-at-Large at HP and writes/curates a regular column called “The Naturalistic Pagan Toolbox.” John writes for numerous other online platforms, including The Huffington Post, Patheos, GodsandRadicals.org, Witches & Pagans, and GodisChange.org.

Since 2011, John has been writing about his often ambivalent relationship with Paganism at AllergicPagan.com, which is currently hosted by the interfaith platform Patheos. He also writes about the intersection of Jungian psychology and Neo-Paganism at “Dreaming the Myth Onward,” which is hosted by Witches & Pagans, and he is working on a book by the same name. John is also the creator and curator of the informational site Neo-Paganism.com/Neo-Paganism.org.

John has published articles in numerous periodicals, including Circle magazine, Witches & Pagans, Greenmantle magazine, and Lune Bleue: Un Magazine de la Ligue Wiccan Eclectique. He has also presented at numerous conferences, including the Parliament of the World’s Religions, the Greening of Religions conference, PantheaCon, and the Mormon Sunstone Symposium.

John was the principal facilitator of “A Pagan Community Statement on the Environment,” which can be found at ecopagan.com. The Statement has now collected over 8,000 signatures from over 80 countries, has been translated into 16 languages, and represents the most successful effort to date to harmonize the diverse voices of the Pagan community in defense of the Earth and the web of life.

John is a former Mormon, a Pagan and a Unitarian Universalist, as well as a Shaper of the fledgling Earthseed community, a religion inspired by Octavia Butler’s science fiction novels and described in detail at GodisChange.org. John crafts Pagan and interfaith rituals for his multi-faith family and practices an idiosyncratic and eclectic form of Neo-Paganism personally, which draws on the archetypal psychology of Carl Jung and the naturalistic animism of David Abram.