Strange Rites

Strange Rites

Author: Tara Isabella Burton

This book was ok. It had some interesting stories/anecdotes to make her point. Especially early on in the book when she talked about this interactive theatre experience (sleep no more) that was popular for years in NY and London which I had never heard of.

I’m currently reading several books on the shift to a secular society, and the growing emphasis on expressive individualism and the focus on “self” and how these relate to eachother. As I was researching books on the subject, this book came up.

One of the books I am reading alongside it is “A Secular Age” by Charles Taylor. It is a much more dense book, both in length (1000+ pages) and in how its written. I picked Strange Rites up while I was reading the book by Taylor.

While reading Taylor, I was beginning to worry my reading comprehension skills were degrading, because I was struggling to keep up with his arguments, and I felt like I had to read so slow, and even still did not always get what he was saying.

Then I picked up Strange Rites and I breezed through the book in a day or so and easily comprehended what I was reading. Strange Rites is a lot more surface level on the topic, and uses very informal, millennial language like you’d read any day on the internet. I felt better that it wasn’t my reading comprehension, but the density of the book I was reading.

I didn’t love this book because she didn’t really propose anything or make any strong or overt statements on if we should stop with these strange rites, and what we should replace them with. It was more like journalistic reporting on the “strange rites”. I think Burton might be a journalist, so perhaps that explains it.

Some examples she uses as Strange Rites, with the argument that these things have become essentially religions for us: Wellness culture (think yoga, soulcycle), immersive theatre, witchcraft/new-age spirituality, techno-utopianism (silicon valley), social justice, atavism, fandoms, kinks/polyamory, rationalism. In each section she’d give a bunch of examples of how wellness culture, or social justice have morphed into religious experiences for many people. With the irony being that we are in increasingly “secular” society, but all that appears to mean is we remove “God” and replace it with many “gods” or other things we worship or build “religions” around. In other words, we are just as religious as we have always been.

One thing that stuck with me from the book is her discussion around bespoke spirituality or religion. The idea that people are increasingly picking and choosing many different aspects of religion that go along with their identity and sense of self. Again, she didn’t have much to say in terms of what makes that good or bad.