Asides

The Appetite for Abstractions

“The logic of the consumption of culture militates against the maintenance of the deep coherence of religious and cultural traditions.  The vast appetite for things … requires that symbols, beliefs, and practices be removed from their original contexts.  Their retrieval enables them to live on, but they are enacted within a fundamentally different logic. … Traditions are pillaged for their symbolic content, which is then repackaged and recontextualised in a way that jettisons their communal, ethical, and political consequences.  Traditions are valued as sources of poetic and imaginative imagery, while their systems of logic, systems of doctrine, and rules of practice are dismissed for their rigidity and exclusivity.”  Vincent Miller in Consuming Religion, 2008.