418: The Power of Ritual with Casper Ter Kuile
Age Less / Live More
Lucas Rockwood
4.8 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 30 June 2020
⏱️ 36 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The Power of Ritual
with Casper Ter Kuile
------------------------------
After just five swipes of your newsfeed, and you’ll immediately see ideology and groupthink dominate just about every conversation. As the world becomes more and more digital, we’re simultaneously becoming more tribal.
The negative fallout is obvious, but what about the positives? What about a sense of purpose, belonging, ritual, and community? Can we find deep meaning and connection on our own terms? On this week’s podcast, a Harvard researcher joins me to share his work on ritual and religion.
Listen & Learn:
- Why agnostics are growing in numbers - but these are not atheists
- How it’s human nature to gather, share, celebrate, and establish norms
- Is there such a thing as a leaderless tribe?
- How to take the good and avoid the bad of organized groups and religion
Links & Resources
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Casper is a Ministry Innovation Fellow at Harvard Divinity School. He holds Masters of Divinity and Public Policy from Harvard University. With his team at Sacred Design Lab, he co-authored a paper How We Gather (2015), and his work has been featured in The New York Times, Atlantic Magazine, and Washington Post.
He's the author of the new book, The Power of Ritual (2020).
Nutritional Tip of the Week:
- Fruit Until Five
Got Questions?
- Send me a voicemail here: Ask Lucas a Question
- Or write to us: [email protected]
Like the Show?
Leave us a Review on iTunes
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | As the world becomes more and more digital, we are simultaneously becoming more and more |
| 0:08.5 | tribal. |
| 0:09.5 | If you go online, Facebook or, or any news site, |
| 0:12.6 | you'll see this, |
| 0:14.4 | represented in political parties, |
| 0:16.2 | you'll see this with screaming tweets |
| 0:17.9 | and all of the above. |
| 0:20.0 | And the initial gut reaction, at least for me, |
| 0:22.1 | is that tribalism is bad. |
| 0:23.6 | It feels like we're primitive. |
| 0:24.9 | It feels like we're ruled by ideology. |
| 0:27.7 | It feels like we have identity to group thinking, we're not individuals. |
| 0:32.2 | And I think, at least for for me most of those things are |
| 0:35.2 | negative I'd like to I believe in the sovereign man I believe in the sovereign woman |
| 0:39.6 | and at the same time there's a whole bunch of things about tribes, about tribal nature that are really valuable, like ritual, like community, like support, shared belief, shared moral values, and a lot of us don't really have a support for the |
| 0:55.1 | things that we believe in anymore. As formalized religion has fallen apart, |
| 0:59.8 | people have found religion, found meaning, |
| 1:02.5 | purpose, belief, community, connection, |
| 1:05.1 | in other things. |
| 1:06.1 | Some of those things are positive, |
| 1:07.6 | some of them are negative, and I would say most of them |
| 1:09.9 | fall under a category which we might consider gray. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Lucas Rockwood, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Lucas Rockwood and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2025.