A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World--and How It Can Save Us

At a time when our shared humanity is under threat and traditional life rituals are losing favor, one of our great decoders of human connection chronicles the astonishing rise of reinvented life rituals around the world and offers a blueprint for restoring togetherness.

It’s easy to be overwhelmed by the sharp decline in the types of life rituals that have been the tentpoles of family and community life since time immemorial. Birth rituals have plummeted, as have comings-of-age. Fewer than half of Americans are married today; only one in three is buried. “It took us ten thousand years to establish cultural norms around how we mark collective life transitions,” writes Bruce Feiler. “It took us fifty years to dismantle them.” We have clearly entered what Feiler calls a “celebration recession.” Can this threat to society be reversed? 

Feiler wanted to find out. As he did with his groundbreaking series Walking the Bible, Feiler went on a round-the-world ritual road trip, attending—and participating in—life rituals in sixteen countries on six continents. These rarely seen spectacles include an adolescent tooth filing in Bali, a mass baptism in the Vatican, and a tribal bride price negotiation in South Africa. He witnessed six weddings in a day in Las Vegas and ten funerals in a week in Ireland.

As he did with Life Is in the Transitions, Feiler also gathered the stories of a hundred ritual designers in twenty-six countries, including a Pentecostal priest in Nigeria who started a fertility circle, the creator of the Purple Pundit Project in New Jersey who leads LGBTQ+ Hindu weddings, and the founder of an app in Canada that helps “create your own rites of passage.”

What Feiler emerged with is a literary achievement, at once a great adventure story in the tradition of Sebastian Junger and Cheryl Strayed; a richly reported sociological portrait in the vein of Robert Putnam and Barbara Ehrenreich; and a conversation-shaping piece of social commentary in the mode of David Brooks and Jonathan Haidt.

Far from a ritual recession, we are in the midst of a  ritual renaissance, one that our outdated radar screens have failed to pick up. Fed up with top-down life rituals, everyday people are reimagining rituals at a pace unseen in human history. From boomers to Gen Z and boosted by social media, this new movement is reviving life rituals for a new century and building thriving communities in the process.

From a master storyteller on the trail of an urgent, untold story, what Feiler has created is a hopeful field guide to modern ritual; a tool kit for infusing collective meaning into our lives; and, perhaps, a framework for repairing our homesick world.