“We should do a book about ritual together.” That is what Jason Lamoreaux concluded as the 2014 spring meeting of the Context Group wound down, and attendees thought about how to preserve and channel the energy generated at the meeting. Richard DeMaris had been in conversation for years with a colleague at this school, Valparaiso University, about ritual in the Bible. Since that colleague, Caroline Leeb, was a Hebrew Bible scholar and he a New Testament scholar, it made sense to treat the whole Bible. We would foreground rituals reflected in those texts and write a book together titled Re-Riting the Bible. Yet, the conversation never developed into a research and writing program, so the idea went dormant.
Jason also wanted to add Steven Muir as a third editor since he had worked on ritual. And so it was that the three of us revived the idea for a book on ritual in the Bible and narrowed the focus to the New Testament. Re-Riting the New Testament was our working title for several months.
We circulated a book outline over the summer and early fall, adding comment upon comment. The annotated outline was becoming a mess of colored comment boxes, but an organizing structure for the book was beginning to emerge. Together we also hammered out a book précis under the title Early Christianity from a Ritual Viewpoint, to distribute to potential publishers. The November meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) was approaching, and we wanted to pitch the book to a short list of publishers we regarded as ideal.
All six publisher representatives we talked with welcomed seeing a full proposal. Some offered advice. We credit David Clines at Sheffield Phoenix Press with prompting us to come up with a livelier title. “How about Early Christian Ritual Life?” Brilliant, we thought.
We also took advantage of the meeting to recruit our contributors. The emerging field of Ritual Studies embraces many disciplines, especially the social sciences, so we were looking for scholars, junior and senior, male and female, who prized interdisciplinary work. We found them among the members of the Context Group and the leaders of SBL’s program section called Ritual in the Biblical World. Several contributors to this book have a stake in both groups.
As we composed a full proposal, we began talking about audience and aim for the book. We wanted to avoid something technical; we had a broader audience in mind. If we were going to make a case for the importance of early Christian ritual life, it needed to be made to the broadest audience possible, not specialists alone. So we thought in terms of a book for the classroom, one that could be paired with a conventional introduction to the New Testament. Such texts typically take a literary or historical approach, neglecting ritual altogether. Our book would offer a different viewpoint and do things a little differently. Some essays model the use of a ritual studies approach in a detailed case study of a text or site; others survey a variety of data.
The editors at Routledge have supported this project and its aim from our very first meeting with them. The encouragement and cooperation of Eve Mayer and Laura Briskman in the New York office and, more recently, Rebecca Shillabeer and Sarah Gore in the Milton Park office in Oxford have been exceptional.
Also exceptional has been the support of our wives, Sarah Glenn DeMaris, Tamra Lamoreaux, and Susan Crawford, who in ways great and small have made this collaborative enterprise possible.