First, a spoiler alert of sorts: the “half” in S. Brent Plate’s latest book is us. That is, the seeking, incomplete human body. Plate, a longtime RD writer and Visiting Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Hamilton College, contends that religion is a physical activity, the spiritual experienced through our senses. And each of those five other objects—stones, incense, drums, crosses, and bread—have a sensory component. (You can read an adapted excerpt from the book at Killing the Buddha.)
That’s not to say that each object has just one religious function or interpretation. Stones mark graves and also become tools of mass communication. Incense makes a space holy, but its value is in its disappearance. Drums can call individuals into trance states, or communities into worship. The symbol of two crossed lines is both a memorial to death, and a celebration of possibility in traditions from China to Egypt to Ethiopia. Bread is ritually important in a Judeo-Christian context, but not in Asian religious traditions; and its non-universality, writes Plate, makes bread like religion: “It has some basic ingredients…and serves certain purposes…but when we get down to the nitty-gritty of it, the similarities between traditions can be difficult to sniff out.”
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