We often look to new solutions to solve modern-day problems—but what if one of the most powerful tools is also one of humanity’s oldest traditions? In A Time to Gather: How Ritual Created the World—and How It Can Save Us, Bruce Feiler spent three years traveling the world trying to understand the enduring power of rituals and collective gatherings. Drawing from both ancient traditions and what he calls the new “ritual renaissance,” Feiler explores the many ways people come together to mourn, celebrate, and move into new phases of life.
Feiler, who has written about life transitions and the “nonlinear life,” argues in today’s world, with ever-shifting timelines, we have an even greater need to mark important moments.
Feiler views rituals as essential. “Whatever the enemy is, ritual gatherings are the answer. If the enemy is loneliness and isolation, ritual gatherings are the answer. If the enemy is political division, ritual gatherings are the answer. If the enemy is AI, ritual gatherings are the answer,” he told me over Zoom.
“The essence of what people are saying is, ‘I want to take back my humanity,’” says Feiler. Rituals, he argues, can help us do that.
Here is our interview, condensed and edited for clarity.
Hope Reese: When did you realize rituals were so important?
Bruce Feiler: I belong to the tribe of group keepers. I’m the one who leads the family dinner game, organizes the backyard Olympics, leads the family meeting, and gathers the family stories. I think every family, every group, every team, every neighborhood has people who tend to the group.
I wrote books on how to hold your family together and how to make connections across different cultural backgrounds. And what happened was my wife Linda and I went from an empty nest to a full nest in 32 minutes, 21 years ago, when we became the parents of identical twin daughters. And then, 18 years later, we went from a full nest to an empty nest in 32 minutes when we dropped our children off at opposite ends of the same college campus. I walked into our home here in Brooklyn and I felt homesick in my own home. My first reaction was, don’t use this word. That’s what five year olds feel when they go to a sleepover, or teenagers feel when they go to sleep-away camp. Then I thought: I have spent the last 10 years thinking about how we navigate life transitions. I should be ready for this moment. But this was different. And I thought: Oh, what I need is a ritual.
HR: Humans have been conducting rituals for centuries. Why have they endured?
BF: We have 300,000 years of evidence that the earliest thing that humans did was gather to mark moments of pain and confusion. People were burying their dead before we were anatomical humans. For thousands of centuries and every place we’ve ever looked, we have evidence that in times of change, people turn to the group.
When someone comes into the group, like after a wedding or the birth of a baby. When someone leaves the group, like after a coming of age or a death. When someone moves or changes work, the group holds an occasion to mark this moment. That’s until this century, when we’ve abandoned them.
HR: Tell me more about that—what’s new about our present moment?
BF: Birth rituals are declining. Coming-of-age rituals have plummeted. In 1960, 90% of American adults got married. Now it’s under 50%. In 1975, 75% of Americans were cremated. Now it’s 65%. Only one in three Americans are buried or have a ceremony of any kind to honor their life after passing. And so, we are in a kind of challenging moment for group togetherness.
Yet all around the world, people are creating new ways of gathering. They’re pushing back against digital saturation, loneliness, and division. I went to 16 countries on six continents and joined rituals, and found that everyday people are saying: We’re just not going to surrender to our phones and AI. We’re going to push back and hold humanity together.
HR: It seems the core of the ritual is togetherness. Why is that so urgent right now?
BF: We are a generation into the epidemic of loneliness and isolation. The enemies are in our pockets, and they are coming at us at all times. The core enemy is that the newest algorithms that we live our lives by are designed to divide us and to spread hate.
Ritual gatherings are the oldest human algorithm. It is the glue that holds society together. It is the first thing that we did, which was to gather together to bury our dead 300,000 years ago, before we were anatomical humans. In a world in which everything is pulling us further and further apart, the only thing strong enough to hold us together is a ritual gathering.
HR: Can you share an example of a ritual you can create today? What does it take to work?
BF: I was invited to do a ritual at TED in Vancouver, TED 2026. You need three things to make a ritual work: a beginning, a middle, and an end.
What you need at the beginning is an opening “wow.” Rituals have a sense of specialness, of sacred space. They have boundaries. So you invite people into a circle, a garden, a grove, a place on the beach. You’re saying: Come into this special place. Outside we were that, and inside we are this.
At TED, we had a flameless candle because we were in an institute that didn’t allow flames. Everybody took a flameless candle and answered a simple question: What’s bringing you joy today?
There’s this phrase from the Catholic baptism liturgy that I loved; as you know, I went to a group baptism in the Vatican. So, you want to welcome people with joy. Take a flower, take a candle, sing a song—something that makes people feel welcomed and safe, and now we’re going to go into the ritual. Then you define the tension and you set the intention. We’re here to comfort someone who’s having a double mastectomy. We’re here to send people off to college. We’re here to say goodbye to a colleague. We’re here to mark this retirement. We’re here to say goodbye to a loved one who just died. We’re not going to lecture, we’re not going to try to fix it, we’re just going to mark the moment.
For the middle, you need a peace plan. The purpose of the ritual is to kind of resolve a problem. I say that a ritual is—and this is unromantic—a compromise rehearsal.
When my own dad died at 87, there was tension in my family. My mother did not want to throw dirt onto the coffin because she thought it was barbaric. She wanted long-stem yellow roses. My sister said the dirt was her favorite part and thought long-stem yellow roses were too Hallmark. I had to middle-child my way through a compromise. So, we got three dozen yellow roses and we didn’t get dirt. But my dad loved to walk on the beach, so we got little bags of sand. And that’s how the ritual kind of created the conflict and resolved it because it was about something deeper.
So what you want in the middle of your ritual is something that makes everybody feel welcome and calms any divisions.
At TED, I divided everybody into groups of twos, and I gave each person a piece of bitter chocolate, and they were asked to share what’s challenging in their lives right now with their partner. Then I gave everybody a cube of sweet chocolate, and they were asked to define what would be a sweet outcome for their tension. People shared this outcome with their partner. Afterwards, people took their candles and brought them up to the front of the room where we had bowls of water and they stuck the candle in the water and offered a wish for what they hoped their neighbor’s outcome would be. It’s a small way of saying: OK, we’re all going through difficulty. Let’s do it together.
And when the candles touch the water, they turned on—they were water-activated—and the whole room lit up.
Rituals end with a moment of hope. What is the best version of the group that we can be? We’re going to think back when we danced at the wedding. We’re going to think back when we held hands and wept at the funeral. We’re going to think back at how we honored our friend who was about to go have her breast removed because of cancer.
So at TED, we took pebbles. People used Sharpies to write out their hope for themselves. Then they took the rock and they put it upside down on a table in the middle of the circle of 50 people. We went person by person, grabbed someone else’s stone, read it out loud, and then carried that home. What we created in that moment was a kind of web of hope where people are trying to make their own hopes come true and the hopes of someone else.
HR: What are some tools for making a ritual that everyone can get on board with?
BF: It could be a family, an office, a team, a neighborhood. School is a perfect example. If I were to ask you to imagine some of the most fulfilling experiences you had at school, odds are that you would summon the kindergarteners sitting around in a circle in a ritual that welcomes somebody into the classroom, a sports team that sits around in a circle before they go into a competition, a group of theater kids sitting around in a circle before they go on stage.
In a class of kindergarteners, they’re coming in from varied worlds. They’ve probably had a difficult time getting there. You know the two most difficult moments in every family can be the hour before everyone goes to bed and the hour after everyone wakes up. Those are the moments of great chaos. Everybody coming into the classroom has come from their own moment of chaos. So what happens when we sit around in a circle is that we create a boundary. We say: Outside we were that, inside we are this. We sit together and we re-welcome one another—we enter this space together.
And so those little rituals do what all rituals do: They calm us, they synchronize our heartbeats, they put us in alignment with the people around us. We have all this knowledge now of mirror neurons and other things, and we know we’re responding to the group. When people first started having ritual gatherings 300,000 years ago, they didn’t have this access to the brain and to biometrics, but they understood it intuitively.
Whatever the situation that you are in, where there are people from different backgrounds, you need some sort of transition element that establishes the group as the mechanism to calm the divisions, make people feel present, and then help them feel aligned.
HR: How are people creating new rituals today?
BF: All around the world, people from boomers to Gen Z are creating this “ritual renaissance.” They are saying: I crave being around other people. I was raised with a script of top-down, institutionally mandated, prescripted, meaning-free life rituals on a pre-approved schedule—that I never approved.
What’s happening is that, from the bottom up, people are creating bespoke, personalized rituals.
A millennial ritual designer was talking to her friend and said, “I’m having a double mastectomy and I’m scared.” There’s no pre-approved ritual for that. So this designer invited people over to her living room. They came together, told stories, and brought comfy clothing because of the recovery. What this woman said was: “The purpose of the ritual is to turn fear into hope.”
What I’m trying to do is invite people to take back their own community and stand up and say, “I can do this right now with my family, with my neighbors, with my colleagues, with my team, with my book group or yoga club,” or whatever it is. Reassert the primacy of humanity in a world where humanity feels under threat every hour.