The Appendix A was hands down my favorite assigned reading
of Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture. Although I found Landscapes of
the Sacred a fairly straightforward and memorable read I did not relish the
times I ended up opening Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture as I found
the text a little bit dense. Thus when I found myself opening up the reading to
pages of clearly defined terms I was excited to learn in a straightforward
manner I was not expecting.
I loved that they
concretely defined Ritual in-depth. Ritual is a word that is thrown around in
all sorts of contexts, and as a result I have a very murky idea of what a
ritual actually consists of, especially in the context of what we are learning
in class. Getting some clarification and distinct guidelines was nice to really
tie down what our class’s rituals would curtail. I also did not realize how
broad the range of issues rituals addressed was. The book describes rituals as
revealing “contradictions of social process” (244). This was something that I
did not even know applied to rituals. I had no clue that rituals attempted to
address social process in any way.
I also liked the extent
to which this part of the book went over certain terms. The example that stood
out to me was symbols. Images and Pilgrimage went into serious depths with
regards to their properties, meanings, interpretations, and similar ideas. Root
paradigms are a good example of a similarly themed idea. Sometimes I have felt
that Image and Pilgrimage did not go into enough detail at times and it made
parts of the reading confusing. This really made the overall reading experience
clear and it stuck with me better than usual.
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