In Amma's Healing Room Ritual Analysis

Religious rituals vary from person to person, from one religious group to another, and certainly from one geographical location to another. Amma as profiled by Joyce Flueckiger in the book In Amma's Healing Room, and the subjects studied in Kathryn Lofton's Consuming Religion, vary quite differently in their approaches to rituals, but nonetheless there is one unifying theme: rituals are an inescapable reality of the world in which we live, and that rituals can turn spaces which might not initially be religious into scenes of religiosity.
In Consuming Religion, Lofton describes rituals that aren't "religious" in the usual meaning of the word, but nonetheless incorporate elements of religiosity, often by mirroring typical religious rituals and applying them to "secular" spaces. Unlike rituals in religious spaces, in which participants usually seeks to honor or connect with their preferred deity, the rituals described in Consuming Religion are the transactional encounters between a person and the secular spaces of the workplace and the market. …show more content…
Lofton labels ritualism's move away from religion and toward secularism as the "Ritualism crisis." "The Ritualism crisis," she writes, "articulated, merely and mightily, that whatever this right ritual might be, it would never again be explicitly incorporated into a singular source of authority, be it governmental, ecclesiastical, or philosophical. These nineteenth-century public debates about proper ritual illustrated how religion had become a category of consumer agency and secular identity" (Lofton 69). The Ritualism crisis forged a new American religious identity - one which would become increasingly devoted to secular institutions and spaces, but never fully leave religiosity and rituals