Excerpt

In what follows, I would like to investigate the character of traditional Christian ritual, not as a full or comprehensive interpretation, but as a single step in that direction, inspired by recent archaeological excavations in southeastern Turkey and elsewhere that imply the primacy of ritual over material and economic factors in the development of society.¹ The implications of these findings suggest that both anthropology and philosophy might focus on ritual as a key to the human. Yet if archaeological remains possess the virtue of keys to the primordial, they also suffer from ineradicable obscurity that the absence of decipherable inscription…