Village Making and Ritual in
To Mother and Father Culture
Village Making and Ritual in a Me-First, AI World
SePTEMBER 15 & 16, 2025
Live in
OXFORD, UK
A 2-Day Reckoning Live with Stephen Jenkinson & Kimberly Ann Johnson in Oxford, UK.
What happens to a culture with no active rites of passage?
What becomes of us when sovereignty is the prize, autonomy the moral code, and AI is a stand-in for critical thinking and a surrogate for reality?
How do we revive culture in a globalized, homogenized, touch-deprived world?
What does village-making look like in a Me First era?
About This Gathering
About This Gathering
Stephen Jenkinson’s latest book Matrimony: Ritual, Culture and the Heart’s Work was released by Sounds True in August 2025. Less than two weeks prior, Kimberly will have dropped off her 18 year old daughter, her only child, at college in Scotland.
Collectively, we’re mostly estranged from tradition and religion, suspicious of matrimony, and seduced by convenience and efficiency. Perhaps Old Order Matrimony — before modernity, before urbanism, before the forced conversion to monotheism — still has something to teach us. Maybe matrimony, patrimony, kinship, ancestors, and ritual are mysteriously doable now. Maybe they are our way back to the village and our roots.
Let’s gather around village-making and cultural repair.
Stephen Jenkinson’s latest book Matrimony: Ritual, Culture and the Heart’s Work was released by Sounds True in August 2025. Less than two weeks prior, Kimberly will have dropped off her 18 year old daughter, her only child, at college in Scotland.
Collectively, we’re mostly estranged from tradition and religion, suspicious of matrimony, and seduced by convenience and efficiency. Perhaps Old Order Matrimony — before modernity, before urbanism, before the forced conversion to monotheism — still has something to teach us. Maybe matrimony, patrimony, kinship, ancestors, and ritual are mysteriously doable now. Maybe they are our way back to the village and our roots.
Let’s gather around village-making and cultural repair.
What happens to a culture with no active rites of passage?
Who is this for?
- Parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles
- Elders and would-be elders and lineage holders
- Culture workers and community leaders
- Rites of passage guides
- Those craving intergenerational dialogue
- Men’s & Women’s work leaders
- Ceremonialists and wedding celebrants
- Those looking to get married/ those who’ve sworn off it entirely
- Oral storytellers
- Those disillusioned with personal growth and interested in cultural repair
- Those who’ve given up on having The Sacred inform their lives/ those that haven’t
Who is this for?
- Parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles
- Elders and would-be elders and lineage holders
- Culture workers and community leaders
- Rites of passage guides
- Those craving intergenerational dialogue
- Men’s & Women’s work leaders
- Ceremonialists and wedding celebrants
- Those looking to get married/ those who’ve sworn off it entirely
- Oral storytellers
- Those disillusioned with personal growth and interested in cultural repair
- Those who’ve given up on having The Sacred inform their lives/ those that haven’t
Who is this for?
- Parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles
- Elders and would-be elders and lineage holders
- Culture workers and community leaders
- Rites of passage guides
- Those craving intergenerational dialogue
- Men’s & Women’s work leaders
- Ceremonialists and wedding celebrants
- Those looking to get married/ those who’ve sworn off it entirely
- Oral storytellers
- Those disillusioned with personal growth and interested in cultural repair
- Those who’ve given up on having The Sacred inform their lives/ those that haven’t
“A ritual, if it is truly a ritual and not a gauzy affirmation of the best of life, or a threadbare disdain for the lowly and the prosaic, carries something of the radioactive about it, something of the dark arts.”
“Rituals are out at the edge of what is likely, what is familiar. They are ill-advised. The ordinary days are more shaken than shaped by them. They are not habituated soothings, utterances of reassurance, making everything right, taking the bored and the bereaved to the emotional mountaintop for a psychic spa day. They are conjuring acts, iffy, nervy, doubtful as to their outcome. Rituals are waltzes with wild things.”
–Stephen Jenkinson
How can we honor our elders and our ancestors?
Stephen Jenkinson
“You can hear the recipe being written for contemporary Western life: singular, independent, low conformity, compromised association with ancestry, the advent of the lonely crowd, the interiorization of social structure until it becomes personal identity, the primacy of personal feelings and ego strengths, overreliance on social acceptance, the personalization of what constitutes ‘true.’
All in all, a terrifying, staggering, overwhelming, irredeemable, irrefutable ethnocide.”
–Stephen Jenkinson, from Matrimony: Ritual, Culture and the Heart’s Work
The UK has been kind to my work from the beginning. My ancestry is there. It’s fitting and fulfilling that I bring my new work on matrimony and culture making to Oxford. And Kimberly Johnson knew the book early on, and I’m very glad to be opening it up aloud with her first.
Kimberly Ann Johnson
Maybe you’ve found yourself in that situation~ make-shifting a ceremony. With no active rites of passage, we arrive at the altars of birth, death, sex, and matrimony with a pile-up. The unspoken grievances and resentments stack up at the thresholds. The ineptness and emptiness radiate.
The liminal moments will always be places for potential alchemy, but with little practice and minimal ritual, it’s more likely that we are lost or empty-handed. Or maybe you have plugged into someone else’s traditions for rites of passages, and it works for a while, but you’ve begun to consider what the ways of your people might have been and how those have been so hard to grasp.
As dire world and planetary circumstances intensify and the way people treat one another is increasingly lacking in grace or etiquette or respect of any kind, the hunger for ceremony and anything sacred is palpable.
If there was ever a time to gather around, the time is now.
The Details
The Oxford University Catholic Chaplaincy
Monday – Tuesday
September 15th – 16th, 2025
This two-day gathering includes:
- Monday afternoon session
- A family-style evening feast on Monday
- Tuesday morning + afternoon sessions
- Tea + biscuits
Monday night’s feast is included for all participants. No opt-outs. We’ll gather around full tables, eat well, and continue the conversation with food at the center.
Tea, coffee and an array of biscuits will be available throughout the sessions.
Please plan to arrive in Oxford by Monday mid-day. Full schedule and timing will be provided upon registration.
The Details
The Oxford University Catholic Chaplaincy
Monday – Tuesday
September 15th – 16th, 2025
This two-day gathering includes:
- Monday afternoon session
- A family-style evening feast on Monday
- Tuesday morning + afternoon sessions
- Tea + biscuits
Monday night’s feast is included for all participants. No opt-outs. We’ll gather around full tables, eat well, and continue the conversation with food at the center.
Tea, coffee and an array of biscuits will be available throughout the sessions.
Please plan to arrive in Oxford by Monday mid-day. Full schedule and timing will be provided upon registration.
“The hunger for ceremony and anything sacred is palpable. If there was ever a time to gather around, the time is now.”
-Kimberly Ann Johnson
“The hunger for ceremony and anything sacred is palpable. If there was ever a time to gather around, the time is now.”
-Kimberly Ann Johnson
How has parenting, like fertility and birth and death, become an industry?
Themes We'll Explore
- Mothering and fathering culture ≠ raising a child – but raising a child is mothering and fathering culture
- The role of men in culture making
- Creating ritual while facing the compromise of tradition
- Coming to the altars of birth, marriage and death
- Identity, inheritance, and the consequences of casting off religion or tradition
- The withering of difference in a homogenized, multicultural world
- Matrimony and patrimony in troubled times
- Sovereignty, autonomy, and reassembling the shards of culture by starting with the poverties
- Globalizing ‘spirit’, privatizing love, owning dying
“Self-sufficiency subverts village mindedness. Even if you can do it yourself, you shouldn’t.”
–Stephen Jenkinson
INVESTMENT
Early Bird Price Available
until Wednesday, August 13th at midnight PT!
Registration is now closed.
£325
£275
Early Bird Price
“The withering of psychic difference between people is the programme of globalization. It is in the architecture of most things partaking of the internet. And it is in the homogeneity of our matrimony.”
–Stephen Jenkinson
About Stephen Jenkinson:
Stephen is an author, storyteller, culture activist, and co-founder of the Orphan Wisdom School with his wife Nathalie Roy. The school is a teaching house for skills of deep living and making human culture that are mandatory in endangered, endangering times. He makes books, tends farm and mends broken handles and fences, succumbs to interviews, teaches and performs internationally.
He has Master’s degrees from Harvard University (Theology) and the University of Toronto (Social Work).
Apprenticed to a master storyteller when a young man, he has worked extensively with dying people and their families, is former program director in a major Canadian hospital, former assistant professor in a prominent Canadian medical school.
Stephen Jenkinson is the author of Matrimony: Ritual, Culture and the Heart’s Work (Sounds True, August 2025), Reckoning (2022), co-authored with Kimberly Ann Johnson, A Generation’s Worth: Spirit Work While the Crisis Reigns (2021), Come of Age: The Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble (2018), the award-winning Die Wise: A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul (2015), Homecoming: The Haiku Sessions (a live teaching, 2013), How it All Could Be: A workbook for dying people and those who love them (2009), Angel and Executioner: Grief and the Love of Life – (live teaching, 2009), and Money and The Soul’s Desires: A Meditation (2002).
He is also the subject of the feature length documentary film Griefwalker, a portrait of his work with dying people, Lost Nation Road, a shorter documentary on the crafting of the Nights of Grief and Mystery tours, and Murmuring of the Land, a film about his farming practice.
About Kimberly Ann Johnson:
Kimberly Johnson is an author, postpartum care activist, trauma educator, structural bodyworker and single mother. She graduated Valedictorian from Northwestern University with a BS in Social Policy (‘97).
She studied yoga directly with the three main lineage holders of the Krishnamacharya tradition- Desikachar, BKS Iyengar, and Pattabhi Jois and taught yoga full time for 15 years, while running a Structural Integration practice.
When radically rearranged by childbirth, Kimberly’s life changed shape to attend to the cultural chasm of postpartum care, and as a result she trained in Somatic Experiencing and Sexological Bodywork to be able to help women heal from birth injuries, gynecological surgeries and sexual boundary violations.
She is the co-author of Reckoning (2022) with Stephen Jenkinson, and author of Call of the Wild: How We Heal Trauma, Awaken Our Own Power and Use it for Good published by the feminist imprint HarperWave, as well as the early mothering classic The Fourth Trimester: A Postpartum Guide to Healing Your Body, Balancing Your Emotions and Restoring Your Vitality (Shambhala, 2017) – translated into 8 languages. She is the host of the Sex Birth Trauma podcast with over 1.4 million unique downloads. Her next book Erotic Seasons will be published in 2026 by Sounds True.
Questions?
This is a two day immersion experience, so there’s no option for just one day only. We want you to be present for this whole experience- the meals and the space between sessions are part of the sessions.
The Monday night feast is part of the session.
Yes, these are live emergent experiences. Stephen and Kimberly have never held an event about village-making and ritual in a Me First, AI world.
Yes, there may be time for live questions, some of them live. You may also submit questions ahead of time, and we may incorporate them.
Bring your books! We intend to have time for book signing, but this depends on how the days go. We will also have books for sale.
No, lodging is not included. Tuition includes 2 days of sessions and the Monday evening feast. Tea, coffee and biscuits will be available.
This is the only live reckoning scheduled for this year in the UK.
Your ticket is non-refundable.
Have another question?
Should you have any additional questions, our support team are ready to assist. Send an email to: Josh@joshuaknight.net
Should you have any additional questions, our support team are ready to assist.
Send an email to: Josh@joshuaknight.net