Nancy Gibbs ends her August 3, Time magazine “Briefing” with a note on the impending 2011 releases of the final Harry Potter films based on The Deathly Hallows. After then, no more Harry Potter films. Oh, dear. She finishes her piece with the lingering thought: “After that, it will be up to fans to find their own excuses for making a summer night feel magical.”
Read more at:
http://www.religiondispatches.org/blog/mediaculture/1735/harry_potter_and_the_persistence_of_ritual/
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Barry, Good comments and questions. Of course, please understand the context in which the piece appeared: It was meant as a response piece to a short Times article, written in a blog for a general public at Religion Dispatches. I simply reposted here as I thought it might strike some readers as relevant. The questions you ask would take a serious full on scholarly book to begin to answer!
But a couple comments: Precisely because of the ritualistic flair of midnight Harry Potter screenings, I am increasingly tempted to say we need ritual like water. I also say this from reading works like Ron’s “Deeply into the Bone,” and this constant desire/need to ritualize our lives. By no means does that mean they are all the same (which is why, in my short piece, I referred to other writings on superbowls and proms, et al), in style, degree, taste, etc. And indeed Protestants got rid of a number of rituals but as you point out in your fascinating article on the Thesenportal, “Luther is back” and he is in ritualized form.
My overall point in much of my writing on film and pop culture is to suggest that, even if we think we as a late modern culture are “secular,” we keep borrowing these same activities. And I’m trying also to write for a public audience that continues to see religion as about “belief in God.” Thus, my final sentence…
Brent: Thanks for your post. If we do indeed need ritual, what do we need it for? Do we need it like water, or need it like a drug? If we need it, does that necessarily mean it is somehow helpful or inevitable? If it is hard-wired, as you suggest, then ritual has evolutionary advantage; but even if and when we arrive at a more or less agreeable definition of ritual, there are varities of ritual, each with different contexts, sources, and outcomes; this ritual might have advantages, positive moral outcomes and valuations (for some mebers of a group); but that ritual over there might not. So, I guess I’m saying I’m a bit leary of a very general statement such as ‘we need ritual.’ Lastly, perhaps we need to think about degrees or differences or styles of ritual. Yes, Protestants were hard on many Catholic rites and popular culture and theatre and performance, etc. But in there place, they also developed ritual forms and styles. Is a Quaker meeting somehow less ritualized than a high liturgy. Rather than more or less ritual, perhaps we need to think about styles and tastes?
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