Matrimony

Ritual, Culture, and the Heart's Work

De: Stephen Jenkinson MTS MSW

Narrado por: Stephen Jenkinson MTS MSW

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—the 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

Through witty stories, insightful history, and meditative questions, Matrimony invites us to examine the significance of matrimony, ritual, ceremony, and cultural articulation—and how to redeem them for future generations.

©2025 Stephen Jenkinson, MTS, MSW (P)2025 Sounds True

Reseñas de la Crítica

“Matrimony is a triumph, analyzing and reconstructing marriage through the ages. This illuminating work challenges the paucity of the modern wedding ritual and offers inspiring, practical pathways for deeper, more meaningful rituals. It’s a bold, clear-eyed view of what the marriage ritual could be, if we are courageous enough to tune in to the ancestors and to follow our truth.”—Manchán Magan, documentarian and author of Thirty-Two Words for Field

“With Matrimony, Stephen Jenkinson trails a troubled beast. A beast many regard as simply AWOL, rarely glimpsed or woefully stretched on the rack of whatever progress report is currently doing the rounds. A beast with hurt feelings. With chewy wit, nimble storytelling, and the unmistakable tang of lived experience, he sets our sights for the initiatory core of the endeavor. Turns out, we barely knew the thing at all. This isn’t a book about groovy intuitions, but mythically reasoned imaginings; far may it sail.”—Martin Shaw, PhD, mythologist and author of Bardskull and the award-winning Mythteller trilogy

“Matrimony is a summons, a reckoning, and a blessing. With the raw grace and precise poetics that are his signature, Stephen Jenkinson lays bare the scaffolding of love and commitment—not as sentimental refuge but as a culture-making labor, as an inheritance both weighty and wondrous. This book will shake loose your assumptions, invite you into the work of witnessing and being witnessed, and, if you let it, alter your understanding of what it is to be bound—to another, to time, to the making of meaning itself.”—Elena Brower, artist and bestselling author of Practice You and Art of Attention