About Rev. Selena Fox
Rev. Selena Fox is senior minister and high priestess of Circle Sanctuary, a Nature Spirituality church, Pagan resource center, and nature preserve with a worldwide Ecospirituality ministry that includes networking, publishing, education, environmental preservation, counseling, events sponsoring, and other work.
For more than thirty years, Rev. Fox has served as one of the elders, religious freedom activists, and public media spokespersons for the Wiccan religion and related forms of contemporary Paganism and Nature religion, nationwide and internationally.
In addition to her work as a minister, Rev. Selena Fox is a certified clinical psychotherapist. She graduated cum laude with a BS in Psychology from the College of William and Mary in Virginia, and received a MS in Counseling Psychology from the University of Wisconsin - Madison. She has worked as a staff psychotherapist at Wellspring Clinic and at Parkway Hospital in Madison. Her professional affiliations over the years have included the American Psychological Association, American Counseling Association, American Academy of Religion, and other organizations.
Rev. Fox's professional life also includes being a guest speaker at conferences, colleges and universities, churches, retreat centers, high schools, civic groups, wellness centers, book stores, festivals, and other venues, and she has traveled internationally as part of her speaking work. Her writings and photographs on spirituality, psychology, herbology, folkways, genealogy, and other topics have been published in a variety of books and periodicals as well as on the internet. She is the founding editor of CIRCLE Magazine and the Circle Guide to Pagan Groups. She is author of the Goddess Communion handbook and the research study: When Goddess is God. Her audio recordings include Sacred Cave Ritual and Magical Journeys.
Born in 1949 in Arlington, Virginia, Selena Fox is an American citizen with ethnic roots extending to Scotland, Wales, England, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, France, Sweden, Norway, and the Cherokee (Tsalagi) tribe of Native America. She is descended from some of America's earliest European settlers, including Quakers, Puritans, Sabbatarians, Baptists, Lutherans, Roman Catholics, and others who settled America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries for religious freedom reasons. Religious study, spiritual practice, and service have been central throughout her life.
Her interfaith work has taken many forms and is on-going. For more than forty years, Rev. Fox has been active in interreligious social justice endeavors, including participation in local, national, and global actions and organizations working for civil rights, world peace, environmental preservation, and religious freedom. In addition, as minister and counselor, Selena works with individuals, couples, families, and communities to peacefully resolve conflicts rooted in religious and cultural differences.
As director of Circle Sanctuary's interfaith ministries, she has designed and facilitated many interreligious ceremonies and programs, including the public multicultural Winter Solstice Pageant held each year at First Unitarian Society in Madison, Wisconsin.
Rev. Fox is a regular participant in the Madison Interfaith Dialogue group that meets monthly at the St. Benedict Center. In addition, she is presently serving as President of the Greater Madison Interreligious Association which emerged out of the Faith and Order Commission of the Wisconsin Council of Churches. Rev. Fox has been a guest minister and speaker on interfaith Eco-spirituality topics in various churches across North America, including Unitarian Universalist, Roman Catholic, United Church of Christ, Methodist, and others.
Rev. Selena Fox has been part of numerous interfaith educational media programs, locally, nationally and internationally, including appearing on radio, television, and film. She contributed to On Common Ground, a multi-media CD-ROM on religious pluralism in America, which emerged from the Pluralism Project of Professor Diana Eck, Ph.D., of Harvard University. In addition, she has been an academic consultant on research projects and publications in a variety of fields, including religious studies, psychology, anthropology, history, law, and medicine. In 1995, she co-founded the Nature Religions Scholars Network, which in 2005 became the Contemporary Pagan Studies Consultation of the American Academy of Religion.
Representing Nature spirituality religion and contemporary Paganism, Rev. Selena Fox has been a speaker and delegate at a variety of international interreligious conferences, including the World Council of Churches Women's International Interfaith Dialogue Conference (1988, Toronto, Ontario, Canada); International Environmental Ethics Conference (1990, Iowa); Human Unity Conference (Chicago, 1980); Nature Religion Today (1996, Ambleside, England); Interfaith Women's Healing Conference (1992, Newfoundland, Canada); Re-enchantment (1997, Winchester, England); and Parliament of the World's Religions (1993, Chicago; 1999, Cape Town, South Africa; 2004, Barcelona, Spain; 2015, Salt Lake City, Utah). Rev. Fox is a member of the 250 member Assembly of Religious and Spiritual Leaders associated with the Parliament of the World's Religions.
For many years, Rev. Fox has served as a consultant on Wiccan religious accommodation issues to chaplains in the US military, corrections, colleges and universities, hospices, mental health clinics, and hospitals. She is among the religious leaders appointed to and presently serving on the Religious Practices Advisory Committee to the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. She also has served as an advisor on Wiccan, Pagan, and Nature religions religious accommodation issues to the Pentagon and US Department of Justice.
As part of her work, Rev. Selena Fox is active in the preservation of ancient and contemporary sacred sites of many religions. As Executive Director of Circle Sanctuary Nature Preserve she oversees its ritual sites, including an ancient one that is on the National Register of Historic Places.
She can be contacted:
Rev. Selena Fox
Circle Sanctuary
PO Box 9, Barneveld, WI 53507 USA
telephone: (608) 924-2216
NOTE: Circle Sanctuary is celebrating its 50th Anniversary in 2024 and we are in the process of updating various sections of our website, including this webpage. For the most current bio, please email selena@circlesanctuary.org