ABSTRACT
The thread of culture—and religion—is memory. This chapter talks about further weaving of that thread. The answer to the question “The Return of the Sacred?” can lead us to the relevant considerations, whether there is a future of religion in modern culture, and what this may be. The chapter discusses the fundamentals, with the statement that "it is axiomatic that the sources of change in religion should be looked for primarily in the social system," and that "secularization" is the most powerful trend. In every religion there is a sacred circle which engirdles the name that cannot be named. The ground of religion is not regulative, a functional property of society, serving, as Karl Marx or Émile Durkheim argued, as a component of social control or integration. The ground of religion is existential: the awareness of men of their finiteness and the inexorable limits to their power.
