Bruce Feiler

We are in this incredible renaissance of new rituals around the world like organ donation or adoption, divorce, cancerversaries, soberversaries.

There is this desire, let's find new ways to be together.

Hi there, Mike, nice to be with you.

Thank you for inviting me.

Well, that question turned out to be quite controversial, because there's different kinds of rituals.

There's political rituals like inaugurations and coronations.

There's calendric rituals like Thanksgiving or May Day.

There's daily rituals like shaking hands and namaste or bowing or something like that.

But what I'm talking about here are rituals that can connect us and bring us together like all rituals.

So my definition is a ritual is a shared unnecessary act that makes us feel at home.

So let's break that down.

It's an act because we're doing something.

We're not just talking about it.

It's shared because it connects us and we have 300,000 years of evidence that this is the essential human act that helps us to have a sense of belonging and meaning which so many want.

But also rituals are unnecessary.

Like you don't need to get down on one knee in order to propose to someone or wear black in order to mourn.

And yet these unnecessities become necessary because we invest them with a lot of meaning and symbolism.

But to me, the most important thing and really why I undertook this project is they make us feel at home.

In some ways, the big arc that I went on in the course of working on this project is at the beginning, I was very interested in the conversation we're having now.

Like, what's a ritual and what's not a ritual?