The plaster-of-paris statues of the Virgin Mary that Catholics sometimes enshrine in their backyards, as well as the plastic Jesus that sticks to the dashboard of a car or truck and the sparkling shrines Indian taxi drivers sometimes fix to their cabs, may be sentimental and not aesthetically sophisticated, but still they represent the urge toward shrine making that is more fundamental to the religious spirit than dogmas and moral prescriptions. Shrines make a spirit palpably present, they celebrate rather than explain and generate intimacy between the human and the more than human.

Thomas Moore, The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life