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Tara Isabella Burton’s Strange Rites is an engrossing exploration of today’s false spiritualities.
Strange Rites (photo: Hachette Books)
The decline of traditional religion has been ongoing for several decades. Tara Isabella Burton takes this decline for granted in her new book Strange Rites (Hachette, New York City, 2020). She addresses how “intuitional” religion now dominates American culture. And Burton has also noticed the shift from a culture focused on private to a culture of public morality. This has made virtue more a matter of government policy rather than individual choice. These thought-provoking observations make her book worth reading.
She argues that the United States has never been a conventional “Judeo-Christian” nation, with church attendance declining after the American Revolution and the Civil War. She uses the historical examples of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Transcendentalism and the Seventh Day Adventists to show “strange rites” have always been with us.
Catholicism posits that human nature is constant, and Burton accepts this, exploring the occult, wellness and social justice movements as alternative, “intuitional” religions. To use Viktor Frankl’s phrase, it is about “man’s search for meaning.”
Continued below.
‘You Shall Have No Strange Gods Before Me’
Strange Rites (photo: Hachette Books)
The decline of traditional religion has been ongoing for several decades. Tara Isabella Burton takes this decline for granted in her new book Strange Rites (Hachette, New York City, 2020). She addresses how “intuitional” religion now dominates American culture. And Burton has also noticed the shift from a culture focused on private to a culture of public morality. This has made virtue more a matter of government policy rather than individual choice. These thought-provoking observations make her book worth reading.
She argues that the United States has never been a conventional “Judeo-Christian” nation, with church attendance declining after the American Revolution and the Civil War. She uses the historical examples of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Transcendentalism and the Seventh Day Adventists to show “strange rites” have always been with us.
Catholicism posits that human nature is constant, and Burton accepts this, exploring the occult, wellness and social justice movements as alternative, “intuitional” religions. To use Viktor Frankl’s phrase, it is about “man’s search for meaning.”
Continued below.
‘You Shall Have No Strange Gods Before Me’
