I'm a nerd

Most of the time, I read academic books and I hate them because they are lame and badly written. Yesterday, I was working on a book that is the best thing I've read in a very long time. A representative quote:

Sacred centers are the foci of religious identity. They are the places on the surface of the earth that express most clearly a relation between cosmology and private experience. A journey to one of these centers is a discovery of one's identity in relation to the other world and to the community of believers--a ritual construction of self that not only integrates the believers but also places a symbolic boundary between them and "outsiders." This is not an unambiguous boundary, however, but a contested and negotiated one. It allows negotiation, revision, and reinterpretation, signaled in the study of religion, by such terms as conversion, syncretism, or reform. The ambiguities of these terms are those of the social process of boundary maintenance.

That is as good as my field gets, I think.