Response to Mark McVann: Exactly What’s Ritual about the Experience of Reading/Hearing Mark’s Gospel?

In response to McVann’s “Reading Mark Ritually: Honor-Shame and the Ritual of Baptism,” this essay summarizes McVann’s application of Victor Turner’s ritual model and assesses support for McVann’s thesis about Jesus’ status transformation in Mark’s gospel, while raising larger questions about the functioning of ritual in relation to boundaries and the experiences of reading and hearing narrative texts.