Week 9--Cobb Chapter 9: Life Everlasting

“Ghosts symbolize belief in and reverence for the accumulated past.” I think, as Cobb asks, we do long to be answerable to sacred traditions with deep histories. Our popular culture is crying out for it. We want the psychological fortitude we once had, and can only be regained by once again shamefully reclaiming our myths. This is what pop culture producers are increasingly doing; they are working hard for every scrap of our mythic heritage they can find and piecing together new trial-and-error compositions of ultimate reality.

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In the U.S. most of us are Protestant or some derivation of it, so collectively we have little space for Purgatory. Purgatory and remembering saints were two ways of ordering the present by remembering and revering the past. But our Protestant ways have largely disposed of extraneous spiritual baggage. After all, in Protestantism was found the seeds of all demythologizing and demystification. We’ve strip-mined our religious past for whatever good scraps of truth we can find, and discarded the rest of what we’ve determined to be superfluous. I think one of the ways in which the Church is lacking in staying with the curve of cultural relevance is the fact that pop cultural producers are picking up the scraps that we’ve cast off and using the old stuff.