I had the pleasure of attending a Passover Seder last week, and I enjoyed experiencing the ritual and the food and learning some history.  I have been to some non-Jewish “Seders” as well, which take the basic Passover theme of liberation from oppression and use it in a more general way to create secular rituals.  I’m of two minds about this. I know that most ritual has been borrowed at least in part from somewhere else, and that human rituals travel and evolve over time and across cultures.  Yet it seems a little rude to me to “use” another group’s ritual for a different purpose.  I feel the same qualm about celebrating Kwanzaa, since although it was created by a humanist and is the winter solsticetime ritual that makes the most sense to me, I’m not African-American.  At the Ethical Society, we often adapt traditionally religious music to make it…

In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Joan Acocella writes on Fordham University’s recent conference on the hit HBO show, “The Sopranos: A Wake.” One of the presentations went as follows:

Philip Scala, a retired F.B.I. agent, said that the ritual by which Christopher was “made” was entirely accurate, down to the burning of the saint’s picture, but that, as part of the lowering of standards so often deplored by Tony, the DeCavalcante family, said to be the model for Tony’s crew, had abandoned the ceremony: “They would just have a pizza party and say, ‘You’re made.’” (This caused other families to disrespect them.)

I’ve never much gotten into The Sopranos on TV, mainly because we’ve never gotten HBO at home. But this little snippet did make me think about rituals of initiation and rites of passage. Any rite of passage seems to be inherently religious, very broadly defined, in that the rite…