Ritual
What rituals do you miss?
Ritual
RITUAL Our problem isn’t just that we are in the habit of shirking important ideas. We are also prone to forget them immediately even if we have in theory given them our assent. For this, humanity invented ritual. Ritual can be defined as the structured repetition of important concepts, made resonant through the help of formal pageantry and ceremon
... See moreAlain De Botton • The School of Life: An Emotional Education
“What is a ritual?” said the little prince. “It is also something really forgotten,” said the fox. “It is what makes one day different from the other days, one hour, from the other hours.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry • The Little Prince
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
Rituals can be defined as temporal technologies for housing oneself. They turn being in the world into being at home. Rituals are in time as things are in space. They stabilize life by structuring time. They give us festive spaces, so to speak, spaces we can enter in celebration. As temporal structures, rituals arrest time. Temporal spaces we ... See more
Byung-Chul Han • All That Is Solid Melts Into Information
To paraphrase Antoine Saint-Exupéry, we may say: rituals are in life what things are in space.
Byung-Chul Han • The Disappearance of Rituals: A Topology of the Present
Unlike standard modern education, ritual doesn’t aim to teach us anything new; it wants to lend compelling form to what we believe we already know. It wants to turn our theoretical allegiances into habits.
Alain De Botton • The School of Life: An Emotional Education
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