Isaac Bonewits died yesterday. He was not only an influential Neopagan thinker and organizer, and a key figure in the North American Druid community, but was also affiliated with the Covenant of Unitarian Universalist Pagans (CUUPS). At The Wild Hunt blog, Jason Pitzl-Waters has links to tributes and obituaries, and his commenters have added other links.

To me, Bonewits was most important as a thinker. Back in the 1970s, he coined the term “thealogy” as an alternative to the term “theology,” which latter term may imply certain beliefs and biases; most importantly, linguistically speaking “theology” has a definite masculine gender (from its root “theos”), and forming a complementary word of feminine gender was a brilliant move in the ongoing feminist critique of religion. His writing and thinking deserves wider consideration, beyond the Neopagan circles to which it seems to have been largely restricted.