The Body Leads the Way:
Ritual, Liminality, and Imagination
My latest book, The Body Leads the Way: Ritual, Liminality, and Imagination, is due out January 2025 from The Liminality Press. It includes reflections on art, time-based rituals, and built ritual environments, ranging from North America to Southeast Asia, and covering Jewish, Chritstian, Native Maerican, Buddhist, animist, an seular rituals.
From the back cover:
In this collection of essays, Mary Lane Potter combines the best of academic acumen, spiritual insight, and personal experience to reveal the transformative liminal experiences that await us everywhere. She reflects on the deep patterns of liminality and the ways in which ritual and imagination give shape and direction to its passages. She rescues our reflection on the great in-between spaces of life from an arid analysis by inviting the reader into an great enchanted dance that transports us through and beyond time.
Endorsements
With sensitivity and vibrancy throughout The Body Leads the Way, Potter entices us to dance with her through spaces between here and there, times between now and then, liminal experiences facilitated through unifying rituals. Traversing continents and cultures, she draws upon wisdom from world scriptures, classic sages, and contemporary scholarship as she delves into the seemingly inexpressible surplus of meaning afforded by communal practices and places. Consistently, she advances ritological studies through poetic descriptions of personal experiences and a robust exploration of relations between art and ritual.
–Joseph L. Price, Emeritus Professor of Religious Studies, Whittier College
This book is a wonder. Potter's dynamic interpretations of the relationships between ritual and liminality are boundary-blasting, widely, deeply learned, and blessedly accessible. She combines personal narrative with scholarly sources in ways that are profound, probing, delightful, and generously invitational. The Coda, "How to Wear a Prayer Shawl," the author's final gift to her readers, is alone worth the price of the book.
–Mary Farrell Bednarowski, Professor Emerita of Religious Studies, United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities
Mary Potter invites her readers to cherish and explore rituals in their daily lives as embodied ways of thinking. Ritualizing leads to wholeness, an integration of body and mind. Her book is based on personal experiences and conceptual richness and leads the readers to a 'liminal life', the between of the world we live in and the world to become. In this fragmented, transitive era we need liminal leaders who offer us a way forward. As such, Mary Potter's book is a beacon, a sign of hope.
–Martin Hoondert is associate professor of Music, Religion and Ritual at the Department of Culture Studies, Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Sciences (The Netherlands). He specializes in music and ritual, and his research focuses on death rituals and commemorative practices.