Thursday quote

"...the drive to 'Sameness' causes a division between 'Us' and 'Them;. As such, rituals and liturgical practices, like the Eucharist, which are supposed to deny the absence of relational dysfunction and instead promote the presence, if only symbolically at times, of mutual, undistorted, unpolluted relating, have been used to demarcate an in-group and an out-group—'sinners'. Add that to the autonomous philosophies of the Enlightenment and the Eucharist becomes, as it so often has, an individual at a table faced with an awesome sacrifice for sin instead of a table of fellowship where a community gathers to retell a story of at-one-ment"—Atonement for a "Sinless" Society, p. 179