Ritual is a podcast about how humans make patterns of meaning in a maddening world. We all do a lot of weird stuff, for a lot of weird reasons. We burn things and chant in unison at a child and call it a birthday party. We wear ceremonial face paint and sacred garments and call it game day. Sometimes it takes looking at practices from cultures and contexts totally different from your own to realize that what you do is just as bizarre. Season One focuses on the quest for immortality and how we cope with our own expiration dates.

The rituals we discuss will span centuries and civilizations. They will run the gamut from the ornately performative, to the relatively mundane. Each of the rituals discussed is performed as an expression of belief in something. Sometimes that is belief in God, or many gods. Sometimes that is a belief in the state. And sometimes this is as simple as a belief in something about what makes us human.