Itihari Y. Toure

Many of us are familiar with the scripture from Jeremiah 1:5: “before you were formed in your mother’s womb, I knew you” (NIV). It reminds us of the immortal aspect of our human spirit.  In the context of West African cosmologies, it is our spiritual essence that is with the ...

Part Four: Ritual is a Form of Activism Engaging ritual as an individual or as a collective act of embodiment challenges ideas about the source and nature of our intelligence and for some it challenges ideas about how we arrive at knowing. As a form of activism, ritual invites us ...

Part Three: Ritual Bring Us into a Divine Dance (the real-time, active participation in the transcendent, where the physical realm intercedes for the spiritual realm). A Divine Dance; ritual creates a divine dance between the guide and the participants, the teacher, and the learner. Ritual uses the spiritual nature of ...

Part Two: Ritual Extends the Depth of Our Imagination. Ritual takes the familiar and enlivens it with our imagination.  Consider it this way, you have a favorite dance or song or prayer. The reason we can dance it, sing it, pray it, again and again is that each time our ...

Part One: Ritual Is Communal Learning. We might agree that “community” is a dynamic, divine dance among individuals who, at any given moment, can structure and normalize what might have begun as a spontaneous, enlivening interaction. Community, in the context of our classrooms, can either be a routinized structure of ...