User:Howardwcampbellii/sandbox

John Halstead is an activist, author, and attorney living in Northwest Indiana, near Chicago.

He is the author of Another End of the World is Possible (2019), which explores what it would mean for our relationship with the natural world if we were to accept that we are doomed. He has written essays on the topic of how to live with the awareness of impending civilizational collapse brought on by climate change and global capitalism.

Halstead is the former Managing Editor at HumanisticPaganism.com, now NaturalisticPaganism.org, a community blog for Humanistic and Naturalistic Pagans. Halstead edited the anthology, Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans (2016), which gathered the writings of 40 atheistic, humanistic, and naturalistic Pagans, pantheists, animists, Gaians, and other non-theistic Pagans from the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and Australia. He is also the author of Neo-Paganism: Historical Inspiration & Contemporary Creativity (2019) and the creator and curator of the informational site Neo-Paganism.org.

Halstead's writings on on Paganism have been published articles in numerous periodicals, including Circle magazine, Witches & Pagans, Greenmantle magazine, and the Francophone Lune Bleue: Un Magazine de la Ligue Wiccan Eclectique. He has also contributed to several anthologies, including Pagan Planet: Being, Believing & Belonging in the 21Century (2016), Godless Paganism: Voices of Non-Theistic Pagans (2016), The Greening of Religion (2017), We Live in the Orbit of Beings Greater than Us (2020), and the Harvard Divinity Bulletin (Spring/Summer 2023).

Halstead has written for numerous other online platforms, including Huffington Post, Medium, Patheos, Gods & Radicals Press (aka ABeautifulResistance.org), and Witches & Pagans. He has also presented at numerous conferences and festivals, including the Parliament of the World’s Religions, the Greening of Religion conference in Columbia, SC, PantheaCon in San Jose, CA, Paganicon in Minneapolis, the Chicago Pagan Pride, the New Orleans Pagan Pride (where he was was the guest of honor), an EarthSpirit annual gathering, and the Mormon Sunstone Symposium in Salt Lake City and Kirtland, OH. He has also taught an online class on Paganism and the Law at Cherry Hill Seminary.

Halstead was one of the founding members of 350 Indiana-Calumet, which was the first chapter of 350.org in Indiana, and which worked to fight the fossil fuel industry in Northwest Indiana.

Since 2014, Halstead has advocated for the “greening” of the contemporary Pagan community. He was the principal facilitator of “A Pagan Community Statement on the Environment,” which was written through a collaborative effort in 2014 and published on Earth Day 2015 at ecopagan.com. The Statement has received thousands of signatures from 100 countries and has been translated into 16 languages. It has been signed by practically every prominent Pagan organization. It 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 and possibly the single largest expression of Pagan voices ever.

In 2016, Halstead was arrested as part of the civil disobedience component of the Break Free campaign at the BP petroleum refinery in Whiting, Indiana. The Break Free campaign involved 20 coordinated actions on six continents and was hailed as the largest ever act of civil disobedience against the fossil fuel industry.