Outside Reading: "The Altar of Experience"


I’m currently in Dr. Steiner’s Rhetoric and Religion where we’ve talked about religious discourse in the arena of both politics and theology.  Both he and Connable did an ethnographic study about a multi-site church they attended and the hyper real experience of the service due to technological mediation.  One of the themes this paper explored was the propensity of individuals to try to diverge from this mediated reality but doing so through a watered down consumerist experience which they mistakenly take for the real thing.  In reading this, I thought of spiritual journey and seeking out an authentic connection with the Other.  I feel like this article was a more technically look at the compulsion we feel to journey, but nonetheless it alludes to the same kind of communitas and spiritual closeness we yearn for in opposition with the worldliness that surrounds us.  

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