genii

Ok, tonight it's not gonna work with the German. My friend Kathrin introduced me to Gayle Tufts and I so wish I had the guts to run around speaking Denglish...

I think all day about what I want to write, but when after-the-kids-are-in-bed finally comes, I often can't string a single coherent thought together. Maybe I need to take better notes?

I did manage to finish "Religion for Atheists" tonight. In the end, I liked it. Yes, it tended towards the broad-brush vision and was short on details - but for that, de Botton's vision just seems so...sane. Though I'm still not quite sure I understand why we would have to build secular institutions and erect secular temples rather than transforming the (atrophying) institutions and (underused) buildings we already have into places where modern, educated humans feel understood and nurtured rather than judged and held back. It's a matter of taking our religion less seriously and our fellow humans more seriously, I think. And hey, I've always been bad at taking things seriously ("flippant," was the word my undergrad thesis advisor used), so maybe I really do have a role to play here, ha.

Also, I thought this was interesting, and I wonder if it's true?

Among the more intriguing features of Imperial Roman religion was that it not only provided for the worship of cosmopolitan gods such as Juno and Mars....but also allowed for the reverence of a panoply of local deities, whose personalities reflected the character, either topographical or cultural, of their native regions. These protective spirits, known as genii locorum, were given temples of their own and developed reputations - which sometimes drew travellers to them from afar - for being able to cure a variety of ailments of the mind and body. ...
Like so much else that seems sensible about Roman religion, the tradition of the genius loci was absorbed by Christianity, which made comparable connections between specific localities and their curative powers, though it chose to talk of shrines rather than temples, and of saints instead of spirits. The map of medieval Europe was dotted with holy sites, many of them built upon Roman foundations, which promised to grant the faithful relief from their physical and mental ills via contact with assorted body parts of dead Christian saints.