There have been more than two dozen online auctions of used Britney Spears chewing gum, some fetching upward of $14,000.
In 2006, Star Trek star William Shatner raised charity money by selling a kidney stone for $25,000.
"Some people desire to have a personal link, however absurd, with power and fame and something glorious and glamorous," says Temple University religion professor Lucy Bregman. "It's a form of magical thinking, something human beings are never likely to outgrow."
Elvis Presley was hip to this. During the 1970s, he'd regularly keep a pile of white towels on stage, use them to mop his sweaty brow, then throw them to the audience as some kind of damp blessing.
Is investing so much devotion - and money - in a tooth all that absurd?
Is it less absurd to make a pilgrimage to Sri Lanka to pay respect to a tooth believed to have belonged to the Buddha? Or to send on tour a bone fragment taken from St. John Neumann, whose remains rest in Northern Liberties?
Zuk's actions aren't all that preposterous, says Emory University's Gary M. Laderman, if we look at our culture of celebrity worship as just that - worship.
"We have instituted a religious culture around celebrities," says Laderman, author of Sacred Matters: Celebrity Worship, Sexual Ecstasies, the Living Dead, and Other Signs of Religious Life in the United States (New Press, 2010).
"It doesn't just function like a religion. It's not a pseudo-religion," he adds. It "is a genuine religious phenomena."
Celebrity-talk is rife with religiosity, Laderman suggests.
Take celebrity itself. In the middle ages it designated a "solemn rite or ceremony."
We speak of screen idols and singers as divas - Latin for goddess - and praise their performances as divine.
