Truly Sacred Things

Nature is full of patterns and we humans love finding them, creating them, repeating them. That’s at the core of language, math, music, and even ritual, which is the repetition of words or actions deemed worthy of representing something bigger than ourselves. Some rituals are very private, some are very public. Some are so commonplace we don’t even

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The sacred is the reification of received religious wisdom, the sine qua non of a particular religious tradition, that which has stood the test of time and proved valuable enough to the ancestors to be passed on as holy. That which is sacred has a low mutation rate—it changes infrequently—and is highly resistant to change; it is built for a static

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à mesure que la science, la technologie et l’ère industrielle avançaient, le monde occidental se «désacralisa». Du moins, c’est l’idée avancée par l’historien des religions Mircea Eliade. Dans Le Sacré et le Profane*384, Eliade montre que la perception du sacré est un universel humain. Malgré leurs différences, toutes les religions ont des lieux (t

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Why doesn’t sacrifice strengthen secular communes? Sosis argues that rituals, laws, and other constraints work best when they are sacralized. He quotes the anthropologist Roy Rappaport: “To invest social conventions with sanctity is to hide their arbitrariness in a cloak of seeming necessity.”32 But when secular organizations demand sacrifice, ever

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