Stephen Bradford Long is a writer, yoga teacher, and Satanist living and working in North Carolina. His work focuses on religion, sexuality, culture, and other subjects that strike his fancy.
Sunday Curiosities is the weekly series in which I share interesting, controversial, or thought provoking things that caught my attention from around the web. Do you have any suggested content for this series? Do you have a blog you’d like me to check out? Please email me.
It is Obscene
Renowned Ethiopian feminist author Chimamanda Adichie unleashed her fury on twitter activism in an essay titled “It is Obscene”:
In this episode of Sacred Tension, I speak once again with Lucien Greaves, co-founder and spokesperson of The Satanic Temple. We discuss his new album Satanic Planet, creativity during COVID, Lil Nas X, writing music for Satanic ritual, and more.
René Grigori is one of many volunteer leaders who helped form the Southern California Congregation of The Satanic Temple(TST) in 2019. At the beginning of 2020 René became the congregation’s Media Liaison and began hosting a weekly Friday Night TST Hangout. In May 2021 René was ordained a Minister of The Satanic Temple.
Interested in writing a guest post for the blog? Please contact me.
This ritual was inspired by the Temple Service sermon on Internal and External Satanism by Stephen Bradford Long and the ensuing discussion. Meditation/contemplation were provided as examples of internal expressions of Satanism while embodying/living the tenets were provided as examples of external expressions. The resulting ritual is a fusion of the internal and external where contemplation of the various situations that arise in the Tarot deepens our understanding of the Tenets and helps us better apply the Tenets to the various situations in our daily lives.
In this episode, I speak with the gentleman skeptic Mick West about UFO disclosure. We discuss the press coverage of UFOs, the weird inner workings of the Pentagon uUFO program, and whether there is good evidence to support the claim that we are in the presence of mysterious, unearthly technology.
Mick West is a video game programmer turned skeptic and debunker. He is a podcaster, youtuber, the author of Escaping the Rabbit Hole, and the founder of metabunk.org
In this episode I speak with religious scholar and intersectional demonologist S. Jonathon O’Donnell. We discuss their new book Passing Orders: Demonology and Sovereignty in American Spiritual Warfare, which is an examination of how American Evangelical beliefs about spiritual warfare intersect with transphobia, racism, and homophobia. Buy the book here.
I’ve been making noise on social media lately about how I deliberately read problematic books. By problematic, I mean that they are deemed, justly or unjustly, toxic or bad by people I usually agree with. I’ve noticed some palpable discomfort when I bring up the topic, so I thought I would take some time to explore why I think reading problematic literature is helpful.
In this episode of Sacred Tension, I speak with Mandisa Thomas, founder and president of Black Nonbelievers. We discuss the experience of being a black atheist, the black church in America, racism in the atheist community, and much more.
It was the activism that first drew me to The Satanic Temple in 2017. My boyfriend was sitting on his laptop and suddenly exclaimed, “oh my God, Stephen, you have to see this.” He showed me the BDSM baby protest, in which diaper and baby-mask clad protestors peacefully poured milk over themselves in protest against anti-abortion theocrats.
In this episode of Sacred Tension, I speak with musician and Youtuber May of Nyx Fears. We discuss transgressive media, horror, fascism, trauma, childhood neglect, LGBT representation in horror, the moral complexity of extreme media, and much more. Watch May’s youtube channel here.
On his podcast Deep Questions, Cal Newport said something that has gotten deep into my brain and utterly complicated my life. I notice, by the way, that the very best things tend not to make my life simpler — they make my life more interesting, complicated, and challenging. This is one of those things:
I think a lot of what we see on social media is basically what I call intellectual groupieism. Like, I don’t want to do the work, someone else tell me the cliffnotes. What are the basic ideas we all agree with, and more importantly, what’s good and what’s bad, and what do I do to make sure I do the good thing and not the bad thing? like great, I’m with it. And now I’m going to, with great fervor, push this philosophy, but there is nothing below it. You haven’t read any of the things, you haven’t done the hard reading, you haven’t confronted the criticism, you haven’t read the alternative and let that collide and then let your roots grow deep. On social media you are often just a groupie for intellectuals, and say, “I just trust you. Just give me the cliffnotes I need, because I just want to go around with your metaphorical jam band and make sure I have bootleg tapes from your concerts…” We don’t do this anymore – we don’t build philosophies from scratch, we don’t go to the sources. Social media says “don’t bother with that. In fact, if you do bother with it, we might yell at you, so just come on, we will just give you the cliff notes.
Stephen Bradford Long 