Peace at the Last was birthed out of congregational need and experience in a specific time and place: Lake Chelan Lutheran Church in Chelan, Washington, beginning in 2007. A member said to me “Pastor, it feels like people are coming to us to die!” For a long stretch of time our little congregation was facing […]
Review of Dale C. Allison’s Night Comes: Death, Imagination, and the Last Things
Night Comes: Death, Imagination, and the Last Things. By Dale C. Allison, Jr. Eerdmans, 184 pp., $18.00 paperback. What happens to our bodies and souls when we die? Is heaven real? What about hell? Can I be Christian and not believe in an afterlife? Questions about death and the hereafter—or if there is something after—occur […]
Review of Thomas W. Laqueur’s The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains
The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains. By Thomas W. Laqueur. Princeton University Press, 736 pp., $39.95. This is a monumental work of history—the history of an idea as much as the history of a physical thing. In this massive book of 557 pages (not including the extensive notes), historian Thomas […]
Minister in the Morgue: A Reflection on the Caring for the Bodies of the Dead
After sixteen years of licensure, the funeral director part of my identity is woven deeply into the fabric of my being. Even prior to these career years, I have been around the dead. My birth placed me in a line of five generations of embalmers and funeral directors. Although much of those preceding generations make […]
Green Burial and Spiritual Communities: One Earth, One Movement
Over the last two decades, the Green Burial Movement has worked to mend U.S. deathcare ways by advocating for simple dust-to-dust human burial. Rejecting the trio of practices that have come to make up the American Way of Death – chemical embalming, the modern casket, and the burial vault – the movement calls for the […]
Where Does the Stepfamily Sit? Pastoral Dimensions of Funeral Seating Arrangements
Bill was a long-time member of the ELCA congregation I serve as pastor. Prior to pronouncing the benediction at his memorial service, I watched the honor guard play taps and present the flag to Mary, Bill’s widow and second wife. While part of me was – as always – moved by this sight, another part […]
Identity in Place: A Matter of Life and Death
This past summer, I went slightly out of my way to visit Oak Grove Cemetery, near Detroit Lakes, MN. This cemetery is known to my mother’s family as one of the “family” cemeteries. I’m not even sure how many of my relatives are buried there, but it’s a lot. My grandparents are buried there. My […]
As I See It: Born, Dying, Dead, Buried, and Resurrected
This issue of Let’s Talk is about death. As I see it, when it comes to an open discussion of death, which affects us all in a most direct way—in our bodies—we practice avoidance. The church participates in this avoidance by not paying enough attention to the body in our ministries to the dying and […]
On the Way: The Last Enemy to be Destroyed
The works of Belinda Carlisle were preserved for just this moment: As the credits roll, “Heaven is a Place on Earth” sparkles to life; a sundrenched California is glimpsed in long view; in close-up, a dose of lethal chemicals course through an IV and a coffin descends into the earth, as the consciousness of the […]