The Faith of the Cross, Saints, and Public Religion

The common cosmology names a world already crowded with God, spirits, the dead, danger, and practical caution. Public religion does not add those things to the world so much as order them. It gives them calendars, processions, bells, doctrines of burial, habits of obedience, saintly patronage, and an institutional language by which people decide whether a district is holding firm or beginning to slip. Faith is therefore not only what many people believe. It is also one of the principal ways a settled country teaches itself how to remain settled.