According to an entry in the Encyclopedia of Behavioral Medicine, a religious ritual is any repetitive and patterned behavior that is prescribed by or tied to a religious institution, belief or custom ...

A new book reports growing interest in bespoke rituals. But when God’s not in the equation, rituals lose their potency.

Our lives are redolent with rituals, from personal to promulgated, from silly to serious, from religious to civic and secular. In The Politics of Ritual, Molly Farneth casts a determined eye on the ...

Rituals can mark time and space, create new identities, and connect people to something bigger. Rituals aren’t meaningless actions. They can mark time and space, create new identities, and connect ...

This April, for the first time since 1991, Judaism’s Passover, Christianity’s Holy Week and Easter, Islam’s Ramadan, Sikhism’s and Hinduism’s Vaisakhi, Jainism’s Mahavir Jayanti, the Baha’i festival ...

Shared testimonies, collective singing, silent meditation and baptism rituals – these are all activities you might find at a Christian church service on a Sunday morning in the United States. But what ...

Milk being poured into the Narmada as part of a religious ritual. The spectacle earlier this month of thousands of litres of milk being poured into a river as a religious offering perfectly ...

The large crowd of men congregated at the center of a mosque in the central city of Yazd, Iran, clad in black and beating their chests rhythmically in unison. They were commemorating Ashura, Shiite ...

The Easter Bunny is a much-celebrated character in American Easter celebrations. On Easter Sunday, children look for hidden special treats, often chocolate Easter eggs, that the Easter Bunny might ...