Much ritual studies scholarship still focuses on central religious rites.

For this reason, Grimes argues, dominant theories, like the data they consider, remain stubbornly conservative. This book issues a challenge to these theories and to popular conceptions of ritual.

Rite Out of Place collects 10 revised essays originally published in widely varied sources across the past five years. Grimes has selected for inclusion those essays that track ritual as it haunts the edges of cultural boundaries—ritual converging with theater, ritual on television, ritual at the edge of natural environments and so on.

The writing is non-technical, and the implied audience is sufficiently broad that any educated person interested in religion and public life should find it intelligible and engaging.