The Rituals That Ward Off Bad Luck Aren’t Arbitrary
One person’s ritual is all but useless to another, especially a really good ritual. This is because the good ones are repeatedly adapted and elaborated in the direction of providing better fit for the particular person – structure-preserving transformations, where the only test of whether the transformation is structure-preserving is subjective fee... See more
Ribbon Farm • Deep Laziness
Keely Adler added
Rituals are tools to remind you of certain slippery-yet-critical truths.
Nathan Baschez • Book Review: Mastery
Ritual provides us with a tool for learning to think logically, analogically and ecologically as we move toward a sustainable culture.
Dolores LaChapelle • Ritual is Essential
Stuart Evans and added
The relationship at the heart of ritual is the relationship between life and death, mediated by elemental forces. The kinds of rituals that fall out of that might be a monthly day of silence, perhaps periodic fasting, perhaps singing around the fire. All such things need to be done as symbolic testimony to the joy and sorrow of being human, no... See more
Substack • Imagining a World Beyond Consumerism
Stuart Evans added
Rituals are not solutions. They don’t “fix” things. They are how we live with what we can’t fix, channels for facing up to our finitude, the way we try to navigate this vale of tears in the meantime. But precisely for that reason they can also be conduits of hope and rhythms of covenant.
James K. A. Smith • On the Road with Saint Augustine: A Real-World Spirituality for Restless Hearts
Jonathan Simcoe and added
Ritualization is a potent stabilizing agent, a simple salve for a stressful time if only we are mindful of how we use its powers.
The Hidden Powers of Everyday Ritual
Mary Martin and added
An easy way into all this spooky shit , for instance, is to consider that for every metaphysical impossibility there is a concretely explainable possibility that exists in the observable physical world. These are less causations than correlations, confluences, or synchronicities . After all, things which were previously considered to be "magical" w... See more
Sadalsuud • It's Called "Woo" Because It's Fun
Stuart Evans and added
It is the emotional and sensuous elements of ritual that are being explicitly drawn on as tools with which to confront the existential challenges we face collectively.
openDemocracy • Why Does Ritual Matter for Social Change?
Keely Adler added