Sacred Rites and Rituals, a forty-five minute film produced by FilmRoos for A&E’s Ancient Mysteries Series helped shape public attitudes toward ritual. These attitudes are now echoed by other media presentations of ritual. I was one of the scholarly consultants for the film and know the process that lies behind the production. I kept…
Consuming Ritual
19 August 2023
Ron Grimes
bodyfilmfuneral, commemorationgender, sexualitygesture, posturepassageperformance, play, entertainmentrites of passage
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The Barn and the Lab
9 February 2023
Ron Grimes
dialoguesethicsillnesslandmetaphor, symbolperformance, play, entertainmentreligion, spiritualityritual, festivalthings, objectswater
3 Comments
Community Restoration and Ritual Experimentation Ronald L. Grimes and Susan L. Scott Below is a conversation between Susan Scott, founder of the award-winning Walkerton Water Stories Project (WWSP), and Ron Grimes, Director of the Ritual Studies Lab. Susan, a writer, and Ron, a ritual studies scholar, contemplate the possibilities for ritual…
Coronavirus Rituals
A Japanese Shinto-based ritual. An allegorical healing performance about defeating the plague, reframed as coronavirus. Links to articles about ritual and coronavirus rituals The last anointing [RG: This is a brilliant instance of journalism and photo-journalism]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/06/us/coronavirus-priests-last-rites.html How to get through the loss of rituals: https://www.everydayhealth.com/coronavirus/how-to-get-through-the-loss-of-rituals-during-the-pandemic/ Coronavirus is changing the rituals of death for many…
Troubling the Waters
Preface The United Nations declared 1981 as the International Year of Disabled Persons. “Troubling the Waters” is a play I wrote to mark the occasion and enable students to study ritual and performance by exploring a story in the Gospel of John. Since the characters are caricatures of students in the course, I have removed…
Ritualizing in the Time of Coronavirus
30 March 2020
Barry Stephenson
by Barry Stephenson Dating from the 4th century, Rome’s San Marcello al Corso houses a crucifix that began its famed career by surviving a devastating fire in May of 1519. Three years later, during the height of a plague, friars of the Servant of Mary, disregarding the prohibitions imposed by the civil authorities, carried the…
Ritualizing in a Pandemic World: Masking
On this day, March 11, in the year of 1988, my daughter was born 2011, a tsunami hit Japan disrupting Fukushima Daiichi 2020, Covid-19 was declared a pandemic On other days, in other years, people survived and thrived, died and were memorialized. From 1347-1352, the Black Death (bubonic plague), killed 25 million people, 1/3 of…
Ritualizing in a Pandemic World: Handwashing
Dad’s advice: “Wash your hands, damn it, I told you twice, wash your hands.” Mom’s advice: “Please, please, dear children, wash your hands.” The parents chime in perfect harmony, “You’re not kids anymore.” Mom and dad are busy as winter bees, dozing and doing research on wills, getting their affairs in order, not due to…
Making It Up As We…Go
This video was first published in 2011, before Cailleah Scott-Grimes went to Japan for the first time. Here it is re-published with questions by Fabiana Fondevila, an Argentine journalist, and responses by Cailleah. Fabiana (by email): Tue, 10 May 2011. Hello Cailleah, Its nice to meet you. I am a journalist from Argentina and I’ve…
Talking with Plants
I’ve just returned from Union Theological Seminary in New York, where I was working with Claudio Carvales, a professor of worship, and his students in a course called Creating Rituals in Community: The Work of Mourning The Earth. Together they design rituals in class, then enact them publicly in James Chapel. Recently, they confessed to…
Performance is Currency in the Deep World’s Gift Economy
An Incantatory Riff for a Global Medicine Show Prior to publication, this was a script for oral performance. Publication required the decorum, the civilizing influence, of those speed bumps we call paragraph breaks. Even though the original script was not written as poetry, it looked like poetry on the page. It looked that way to…
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