{"id":53444,"date":"2020-09-28T09:14:49","date_gmt":"2020-09-28T14:14:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/?p=53444"},"modified":"2020-10-06T13:31:51","modified_gmt":"2020-10-06T18:31:51","slug":"corporation-rituals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/2020\/09\/28\/corporation-rituals\/","title":{"rendered":"Corporation Rituals"},"content":{"rendered":"

On 28 August, the New York Times<\/em> ran a story with the headline \u201cGod Is Dead.\u00a0 So Is the Office.\u00a0 These People Want to Save Both<\/a>.\u201d\u00a0 Correspondent Nellie Bowles writes about \u201critual consultants\u201d whose \u201cbusiness is borrowing from religious tradition to bring spiritual richness to corporate America.\u201d\u00a0 One such consultant discusses designing \u201crituals for small firms for events like the successful completion of a project\u2014or, if one fails, a funeral.\u201d\u00a0 Other rituals include \u201ca ritual for purchasing your domain name (aka your little plot of virtual land up in the clouds)\u201d and\u00a0 a ritual \u201cfor when you get the email from LegalZoom that you\u2019ve been officially registered as an LLC.\u201d<\/p>\n

As I see it, the world of work already has many such rituals whether one has in mind the retirement party with the presentation of a gold watch, the presentation of certificates honoring five or ten or twenty years with the same organization, or going out for dinner or drinks after a major accomplishment.\u00a0 Designing new rituals is, in and of itself, rather innocuous and it may even be helpful.<\/p>\n

Where things take a darker turn for me is when rituals are commodified.\u00a0 Bowles writes:<\/p>\n

Evan Sharp, the co-founder of Pinterest, hired [ritual consultants] to categorize all major religious practices and think of ways to apply them to the office.\u00a0 They made him a spreadsheet.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe pulled together hundreds of practices from all these different religions and cultural practices and put them in a spreadsheet and just tried to categorize them by emotional state: which ones are relevant when you\u2019re happy, which are relevant when you\u2019re angry, and a couple other pieces of metadata.\u201d<\/p>\n

. . .<\/p>\n

\u201cSome of the rituals I grew up with in Protestantism really have emotional utility,\u201d he said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Perhaps anticipating the response of readers like me, Bowles turns to Tara Isabella Burton to provide a critical perspective.\u00a0 Bowles writes about how Burton describes<\/p>\n

the unbundling of rituals\u2014a reference to how cable TV packages split apart after the advent of streaming services.\u00a0 In the unbundled world, people pick what they want from different faiths and incorporate it into their lives\u2014a little Buddhism here, a little kabbalah there.\u00a0 It is consumer-driven religiosity.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea is that what we want, what feels good to us, what we desire, that all of this is constitutive of who we are, rather than community,\u201d Ms. Burton said.\u00a0 \u201cWe risk seeing spirituality as something we can consume, something for us, something for our brand.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Religious rituals have effects\u2014including emotional effects\u2014on those who participate in them, but to pillage religious traditions for rituals that have the right emotional utility is to cast aside the finally non-utilitarian nature of worship.\u00a0 This error is compounded when religious rituals (or the shells of such rituals) are enacted without reference to the praise and glory of God or to the wide context of salvation history.<\/p>\n

Rituals do not merely meet us when we are happy or angry or sad.\u00a0 In and through rituals, it is the God of Jesus Christ whom we encounter (often in the company of fellow believers) when we are happy or angry or sad.<\/p>\n

Many employees in this time of pandemic are working from home via Zoom, Skype, or similar software.\u00a0 (That many employees do not have this luxury is another question entirely!).\u00a0 In a workday experience that is now somewhat flattened, writes Bowles, \u201csacred consultants are helping to usher in new rituals for shapeless workdays, and trying to give employees routines that are imbued with meaning.\u201d\u00a0 When such consultants draw on rituals intended to orient people to ultimate meaning (in the sense of Paul Tillich) in order to supply \u201cmeaning\u201d for one\u2019s employment, problems can easily ensue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On 28 August, the New York Times ran a story with the headline \u201cGod Is Dead.\u00a0 So Is the Office.\u00a0 These People Want to Save Both.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":52,"featured_media":53445,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3119,3149,2864],"tags":[3447],"class_list":["post-53444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-plaza-new-ws","category-do-it-rite","category-ritual_studies","tag-commodification"],"yoast_head":"\nCorporation Rituals - Home<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/praytellblog.com\/index.php\/2020\/09\/28\/corporation-rituals\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" 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