your outie craves routine

By “ritual,” I mean those things we do that help us know who we are.

Routines are comforting, too. For many years I followed the same routine whenever I’d turn on my computer: first check e-mail, then go to a series of five different websites, all in the same order each time, multiple times per day. Often, I’d have many more important things to do, but I needed the comfort fix provided by visiting familiar websites

Some of us are interested in religious studies because we are interested in people. People do religious things; they symbolize and ritualize their lives and desire to be in a community. What piqued my interest in shopping malls initially was their concrete expressions of all three of these religious impulses. Quadrilateral architecture, calendrical

Many of the ritualized gatherings in our more intimate spheres—weddings, bar mitzvahs, graduation ceremonies—have been repeated over time such that we become emotionally attached to the form long after it accurately reflects the values or