Encyclopedia of Religious Rites, Rituals and Festivals edited by Frank A. Salamone (Religion and Society: Routledge) Religious beliefs are expressed through ritualized behavior and festivals. Many rituals and festivals take place in public, meaning that such expressions of faith are societal as well as individual forms of human behavior. The similarity in the general patterns of rituals and festivals across cultures and religions is striking. For example, most cultures and religions mark major life-course transitions such as birth, marriage, and death with public ritual expressions, and numerous festivals are tied to food-producing activities such as planting and harvesting. Where religions and societies vary is in the meanings associated with ritual behavior and the specific forms those behaviors take.

The Encyclopedia of Religious Rites, Rituals, and Festivals explores this complex topic through articles covering the following general categories of information:
General concepts and ideas such as communitas, inversion, purity and pollution, and pilgrimages
Major forms of ritual and festival such as rites of passage, devotional rites, sacrifice, calendrical rites, carnival, and fasting
Religious rites and festivals of major religions, including Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, Catholicism, and Judaism
Rites and festivals in cultural regions such
as China, sub-Saharan Africa, and the Pacific islands
Life-cycle rites, including those associated with birth, coming of age, marriage, and death
Specific rites and festivals, such as Divali, Easter, Ramadan, snake handling, and Yom Kippur

The Encyclopedia of Religious Rites, Rituals, and Festivals contains 130 entries contributed and signed by scholars from international universities and institutes, with expertise in such fields as Asian and Pacific studies, archaeology, communication studies, cultural anthropology, cultural studies, international studies, philosophy, psychological anthropology, religious studies, social anthropology, sociology, and theology.

An unprecedented resource, this new encyclopedia provides in-depth coverage of a vast array of worldwide practices with entries that draw on the latest research available, offering fresh insights while maintaining a connection with established scholarship. The cross-cultural coverage will help foster interfaith understanding as well as present and explain unfamiliar behaviors and rituals.

Scholars of religion have yet to agree on just what ritual is. They also have yet to agree on the boundary (if such a boundary exists) between religious ritual and secular ritual. To some extent ritual is one of those phenomena that falls under the heading of "you know it when you see it." Despite the absence of a definition-or perhaps because of the absence-ritual has drawn much attention from religious studies scholars, anthropologists, historians, sociologists, psychologists, and other experts. Perhaps this is because ritual is often the most visible manifestation of religion and the one that first comes to the attention of outside observers.
Ritual is an enormously large and complex topic. Ritual is not static; it has varied enormously over the course of human history and across cultures. The anthropological literature is filled with detailed descriptions and analyses of rituals of several thousand cultures around the world. This means that no reference work on rituals can he truly encyclopedic because there is simply too much to cover. Nonetheless, we have chosen to be broad and inclusive in our coverage in this encyclopedia, not only covering a broad range of topics but also providing summaries of the knowledge on rituals developed by scholars from a broad range of disciplines. These scholars include anthropologists, sociologists, theologians, religious studies specialists, historians, folklorists, popular culture experts, and philosophers. This inclusiveness provides START TRANSACTION WITH CONSISTENT SNAPSHOT; /* 2338 = 50d023f4921c731b7f6482d3a8c205f4