An upbeat conversation between two voices about David A. Hogue, “Living As If… Ritual, the Brain, and Human Experience”, chapter 4 of Remembering the Future, Imagining the Past: Story, Ritual, and the Human Brain (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2003), 116-152. Week 6 reading for Faith in a Fractured World. About 26 minutes.
Covered: who Hogue is and the altar call as his test case; Anderson and Foley on stories without rituals and rituals without stories; the six dimensions of ritual (prescribed, symbolic, performed, repeated, public, effective); van Gennep’s three phases and the neglected reincorporation; Hogue’s four guidelines for designing a new ritual and the role-played divorce rite; Driver’s shelter and pathway rituals; story, ritual and experience; the neuroscience (event segmentation, d’Aquili and Newberg, Absolute Unitary Being) and how it has held up; how the chapter was used in class; and what it means for a liturgy of gender affirmation and renaming.
Sources
- David Hogue, speaker biography, Religious Education Association
- Nielsen et al., “An Evaluation of the Left-Brain vs. Right-Brain Hypothesis with Resting State Functional Connectivity MRI”, PLoS ONE 8(8), 2013
- Newberg, Alavi, Baime and Pourdehnad, “The measurement of regional cerebral blood flow during the complex cognitive task of meditation: a preliminary SPECT study”, Psychiatry Research 106(2), 2001 (abstract)
- Zacks et al., “Human brain activity time-locked to perceptual event boundaries”, Nature Neuroscience 4(6), 2001
- Herbert Anderson and Edward Foley, Mighty Stories, Dangerous Rituals (Jossey-Bass, 1998)
- Ronald L. Grimes, Deeply into the Bone: Re-inventing Rites of Passage (University of California Press, 2000)
- Elaine Ramshaw, Ritual and Pastoral Care (Fortress, 1987)
- Tom F. Driver, The Magic of Ritual (HarperCollins, 1991)
- Eugene d’Aquili and Andrew Newberg, The Mystical Mind (Fortress, 1999)
- Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Yale University Press, 2009)
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