Their social and cultural power is always bound up by the ways in which they take material form, such as the imprints on coins, the architecture of public buildings, and the images on our walls or television screens. I f Durkheim was right to claim that the sacred remains a powerful social force in the modern world, where can we find it? One obvious answer is the collective symbols that people gather around as they experience some form of shared moral sentiment: the flag of the nation, the image of the abused child, or the grave of the revolutionary hero.
