For the last three years I’ve criss-crossed Europe to pursue cutting-edge tools in climate law and governance that might help keep my hometown of New Orleans from drowning. Bruce Jennings defines governance as “the overall process of coordinating, shaping, and directing individual and collective agency,” and I sought tools of agency. One night in Amsterdam, after hours of technocratic conversation over a nice bottle of wine, one of the key voices in the global plastics treaty process confessed, “none of these innovations are going to work - we’ve lost social trust. What we really need is new ritual.” To my surprise, experts in at least five other countries expressed the same yearning. A colleague in Sweden delightedly exclaimed, “breaking bread is governance!” 

Courtrooms, the halls of Congress, and the American shopping mall are all venues of ritual, what theologian James K.A. Smith calls, “cultural liturgies.” They are formed by and form our bodies into teleological (~ purpose-driven) belief systems, conceptions of human agency, habits of action. When we gather to sing, to pray, to grieve or rejoice, we enculturate ancient and new habits of social cohesion towards what Hauerwas terms “communities of trust.” Like a stylus on a wax record, our singing carves something akin to shared epigenetic grooves that become the rhythm and timbre of our living. When we co-create music with our bodies, we co-create the telos of our world. 

My Swedish colleague helped co-design a local-global governance process that centers around a series of dinners to address hope & grief in order to build experiences of trust that engender policy-making beyond denialism. At the heart of the dinner series are Music that Makes Community rituals of collective singing. One of these recent dinners, explicitly focused on “Collapse Grief & Hope,” ended with scholars, policymakers, and philosophers from five continents pounding their fists on the table and raising their voices in a group singing of This Fire (by Laurence Cole). A team is currently building a “Climate Sing” for NYC Climate Week 2026. A lead strategic advisor to a former U.S. President recently exclaimed that “the thing the climate movement needs is a song.” 

These ancient tools are cutting edge once again.

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Image caption: Citizens from across the globe discuss collapse at a Grief & Hope Dinner in November 2024 at The New Institute, Hamburg, Germany. 

Andrew Doss is an attorney, writer, and aspiring Episcopal priest who works at the intersection of governance, liturgy, and art. While his MDiv thesis presentation at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music focused on the evolutionary biology behind collective singing and its implications for cultural formation, he most recently applied those ideas as a Fellow in Planetary Governance at the New Institute in Hamburg, Germany.  

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