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Liberating Rites: Understanding the Transformative Power of Ritual. By Tom F. Driver. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1998. (Expanded version of The Magic of Ritual: Our Need for Liberating Rites That Transform Our Lives and Our Communities, Harper, 1991.) xviii + 270 pages. $20.00 pb.
Tom Driver says that he wrote this book in response to what he calls "ritual boredom." This boredom he attributes to two overlapping causes: "Many of the rituals that are available to people in our society are indeed dull and boring," and "Many people do not understand what rituals do and why they are a necessary part of human life" (8). The next 204 pages are devoted to attempting to relieve the boredom by dealing with its twin causes, and, whatever else may be said about it, Liberating Rites is not boring. The intended audience is everyone who is interested in ritual, not just specialists. Although he writes as a Christian, and in his conclusion speaks of the transforming ritual power of the Christian sacraments, at least ideally, he does not seek to limit his readership to Christians, and he speaks disapprovingly of those books which "virtually identified ritual with Christian liturgy and [were] totally uncritical of hierarchical sacramentalism" (10). (I assume my Meaning of Ritual is one of them.)
Not only does Driver cast his net for a wide audience, he has a wide definition of ritual. "The animals ritualize, and so do we" ( 15 ). In fact, he claims, "We have not understood that ritualizing is the bridge or pathway connecting animal ways to human.... If we did not ritualize, we would not speak" ( 13). Human beings, like other animals, he contends, need ritualizations "to give stability to our behaviors and to serve as vehicles of communication" (23). His entire treatment of the ritualizing of animals and its relationship to human...