The Place of Ritual in Our Time

Abstract

This essay represents my contribution to a collection of essays I have edited entitled Religion and Cultural Studies. The contributors range from scholars in the fields of English, History, History of Religion, and Anthropology, to scholars such as Jack Miles and Karen McCarthy Brown, whose books, God: A Biography (1995) and Mama Lola: A Voodoo Priestess in Brooklyn (1991), have also attracted nonacademic audiences. The collection attempts to convey the centrality of religion in our current cultural scene and also to build on what is in my view one of the best prospects of cultural studies as a field of inquiry: the recovery of interdisciplinary concepts, both in our own time and in previous ones. My essay will be a plea for recognition of the continuum between intellectual work and ordinary life, for the continuity between esoteric and common practices. The tie between cultural studies and religion, in my view, is inevitable; cultural studies has already begun, and will continue, to get religion. Prominent analysts of religion and culture have helped to articulate the prospects of this engagement. Cornel West defines the centrality and variety of American life: all the religious sects and groups and cults and denominations ... through which folk come together in this country (695). David Hollinger discovers a new Sombartian imperative in the air. (In place of Why is there no socialism in the United States? we have Why is there so much Christianity in the United States? [21].) It may be that for our time religion will be the grand multicultural scene, the great pluralist case. This is a large claim. And let me begin accordingly with a broad postulate: ritual acts express an unbridgeable gap-a chasm-between what is sought or aspired to and the historical present. Ritual actors are always at a loss in relation to some prior moment of greater spiritual promise and communal coherence. In this sense, sacrifice is the quintessential ritual form, and