Matrimony: Ritual, Culture, and the Heart’s Work, is Stephen Jenkinson’s new book about the redemptive power for culture making lying in wait in the tamed confines of the wedding ceremony. As he’s done with money (Money and the Soul’s Desires), dying (Die Wise), elderhood (Come of Age) and pandemics (A Generation’s Worth), in Matrimony Jenkinson finds a living heart in the debris field of contemporary culture, and makes the case that radical hospitality, strangerhood and the old sacraments of trade together make the trail we could follow back into real person making and ceremonial literacy: that’s what’s in store here.

A restoration of the village-making power of matrimony, a building of cultural memory, and an examination of meaning-making for our ceremonially adrift time.

Public and private rituals are failing this culture. Longtime scholar, storyteller, and ceremonialist Stephen Jenkinson has tracked that failure, along with the personal poverties that have followed, and has set about mending the brokenness from meaning and connection, one wedding ceremony at a time.

“Matrimony is the place where culture leans on love for its portion, its tithe,” explains Jenkinson. “It is the mothering of culture, and ritual is its vehicle, and patrimony its precursor.” Privatizing love, turning matrimony into a social institution barren of all substance, and flattening rituals into benign, generic celebrations of life erodes our skills as citizen witnesses to a troubled time. The way forward, then, is to learn and reclaim our cultural ceremonies and their meaning.

Among the insights that Stephen Jenkinson offers in this thought-provoking work:

• The place of matrimony and patrimony in modern understandings of romance
• The importance of village rites and rituals
• Old understandings of union, marriage, and matrimony rendered new