Rituals for Our Times - by Evan Imber-Black & Janine Roberts (Paperback)

About the Book

A timely, groundbreaking guide to enhancing the rituals in our lives, which helps people to enrich their relationships and reestablish their family ties. The coauthors of Rituals in Families and Family Therapy show how to create meaningful rituals adapted to individual lives and family structures, for new meaning in old and new traditions and celebrating life's milestones.

Book Synopsis

Authors Evan Imber-Black and Janine Roberts show how we can learn to tap the power of rituals to mark transitions, express important values, heal the past, and deepen relationships. Each chapter looks at the special issues and possibilities for nuclear, extended, single-parent, and remarried families, as well as for single adults and couples. The authors also pay particular attention to how changing gender roles are reflected in our rituals, and how revitalized traditions can actually alter the course of intimate relationships. Filled with first-person stories and practical examples, this book will help all readers enhance the meaning of traditions old and new, reinforcing and celebrating life's many milestones and ties.

Review Quotes

[The authors] brilliantly demonstrate how we can, and indeed, must reanimate old rituals and create new ones. With masterful clinical and cultural sensitivity and inspiring inventiveness, they show us how, through ritual, we can give to our lives, to our loves, to our comings and goings, the experience of meaning that we need to feel healed, whole, and connected-coherent within ourselves, in union with others, in continuity with time past and future.

A wonderful book that helps put people in touch with what is most central in their lives, and offers new and inspiring ways of looking at ourselves and our relationships.

About the Author

Evan Imber-Black, Ph.D., is Director of Program Development at the Ackerman Institute for the Family, and Professor of Psychiatry at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. She is an internationally recognized practitioner and consultant in family therapy. She is also the author of The Secret Life of Families: Truth-telling, Privacy and Reconciliation in a Tell-all Society.

Janine Roberts, Ed.D., is Professor and Family Therapist at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. She is treasurer of the American Family Therapy Academy, and former editor of the Journal of Feminist Family Therapy. She presents frequently to national and international audiences on rituals, family stories, and family therapy.