This is a volume about the life and power of ritual objects in their religious ritual settings. In this Special Issue, we see a wide range of contributions on material culture and ritual practices across religions. By focusing on the dynamic interrelations between objects, ritual, and belief, it explores how religion happens through symbolic materiality. The ritual objects presented in this volume include: masks worn in the Dogon dance; antique ecclesiastical silver objects carried around in festive processions and shown in shrines in the southern Andes; funerary photographs and films functioning as mnemonic objects for grieving children; a dented rock surface perceived to be the god’s footprint in the archaic place of pilgrimage, Gaya (India); a recovered manual of rituals (from Xiapu county) for Mani, the founder of Manichaeism, juxtaposed to a Manichaean painting from southern China; sacred stories and related sacred stones in the Alor–Pantar archipelago, Indonesia; lotus symbolism, indicating immortalizing plants in the mythic traditions of Egypt, the Levant, and Mesopotamia; lavishly illustrated variations of portrayals of Ravana, a Sinhalese god-king-demon; figurines made of cow dung sculptured by rural women in Rajasthan (India); and mythical artifacts called ‘Apples of Eden’ in a well-known interactive game series.

Many rituals and festivals take place in public, meaning that such expressions of faith are societal as well as individual forms of human behaviour. The similarity in the general patterns of rituals and festivals across cultures and religions is striking. For example, most cultures and religions mark major life-course transitions such as birth, marriage, and death with public ritual expressions, and numerous festivals are tied to food-producing activities such as planting and harvesting. Where religions and societies vary is in the meanings associated with ritual behaviour and the specific forms those behaviours take.

In Christian Symbol and Ritual, Bernard Cooke and Gary Macy offer an accessible and engaging introduction to the topic written from a non-denominational perspective. Cooke and Macy demonstrate that celebration, ritual, and symbol are already central to our lives, even though most do not see their actions as symbolic or ritualistic. They connect central Christian symbols to the symbols and rituals already present in everyday life and place Christian theology in a familiar context. After discussing the characteristics and functions of rituals, they explore different kinds of ritual, including those of friendship, worship, and healing. The authors also examine such questions as how rituals establish and maintain power relationships, how "official" rituals are different from "popular" Christian rituals and devotions, and how Christian rituals function in the process of human salvation. Christian Symbol and Ritual is an invaluable resource for students, teachers, and lay readers.

"Voices of the Ritual analyzes the revival of and manifestation of rituals at female saint shrines in the Holy Land. The book's central claim is that, in the Middle East, a turbulent, often violent political context, states tend to have no clear physical borders, and lands are constantly at stake. In this context, deprived ethno-religious groups with no voice in the political, cultural, media, and legal arenas look for alternative venues to voice their entitlements. Through the book I argue that in Israel/Palestine, religious minorities (Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Druze, and others) employ rituals in various sacred places, especially female saints' shrines, to claim their belonging to and appropriation of territory. At the heart of this book is the question: What does this female ritualistic revival mean-politically, culturally, and spatially? To answer this question, I base my analysis on a long ethnographic study (2003-2017) that analyzes the rise of female sacred shrines, focusing on four dimensions of the ritual: the body in motion, female materiality, place, and the rituals encrypted in the Israel/Palestine landscape. The book sets out to examine the popularity of body rituals in sacred places, and the female themes that stem from these rituals. I show that, in the practices at these shrines, mostly canonical, the idea of the "body in motion" is central, with rituals imitating birth and the cycle of life using a set of body gestures. These mimetic rituals, performed by men and women, are intimate forces that extend between the female saint and the worshippers. Female materiality strengthens intimacy and creates a bridge between the experience and the material. Minority groups in these venues, Jews and Christians, use these sacred shrines, their female contents and intimate bodily ritualistic experience, to stake a claim to and appropriate the land. The intimacy between saint and worshipper (females and males each in their own modes) created with the body that imitates the cycle of life, and the female material scattered around, are keys to intimate claims to the land, making the land familiar to worshippers. Rituals encrypt female themes into the landscape, a dynamic that is taking place in a zone that has for decades been dominated by violent, masculine-disseminated war and conflict"--

"As an instructor of students new to the field of religious studies, I have found David Hicks's anthology Ritual and Belief to be an invaluable tool in the classroom. The wide array of selections from different disciplines gives the students a taste of what it means to be a scholar of religion. The new edition only further enhances the text as a resource for my students"---Sarita Tamayo-Moraga, Santa Clara University --

An updated primer for the burgeoning field of ritual studies.

This collection of studies on ritual and ritualizing leads the reader through religious

Volume two of Theorizing Rituals mainly consists of an annotated bibliography of more than 400 items covering those books, edited volumes and essays that are considered most relevant for the field of ritual theory. Instead of proposing yet another theory of ritual, the bibliography is a comprehensive monument documenting four decades of theorizing rituals.