The case for a secular funeral ritual
Though secular people are increasingly saying no to a religious funeral, we note that it’s taking them forever to do it. Why so? Because, though they reject the theology, they like the ritual. Ritual is the antidote to chaos. It brings order. Everyone knows what to do. When death turns our life upside down, convention conquers […]
Signs of the times – undertakers as event managers
Funerary customs are on the move in Germany, which seems to be emerging as the country to watch at the moment. Undertakers are becoming a little like event managers. People who are not religious and don’t go to church expect undertakers to organize a ritual for the funeral. In recent years the culture of mourning […]
All things to all people?
Posted by Richard Rawlinson For better or worse, depending on your viewpoint, you know where you stand with both civil and Catholic funerals – give or take a few 1,000 variations on a theme. However, I’m not sure what to make of this organisation, and would be interested to hear your take on it. For […]
What do atheists profess?
Posted by Richard Rawlinson, religious correspondent Vale makes interesting points in the thread beneath my Beyond the Abyss post, which discusses the gap between secularist individuality and religious communal ritual: We (I) believe that community and the communal celebration of key events is important – yet secularism, at least as it finds expression in the […]
Death in the community
Beyond the unappetising business of flogging pre-need plans to the tottering classes, undertakers do next to nothing to educate the public about funerals. They seek to be seen as public-spirited. They do good stunts, raise money for the hospice here, the air ambulance there. But how many stage events to raise awareness of the […]
ARKA funeral day this Saturday in Lewes
Bringing Death to Life – 27th August 2011 All Saints Arts and Youth Centre, Friars Walk, Lewes. Free Entry ARKA Original Funerals of Brighton opened its new office in Lansdown Place Lewes, in July this year, with the ceremonies and celebrant company, Light on Life. ARKA Original Funerals and Light on Life are recognised […]
Don’t miss the bus
This from Charles Moore in the Spectator, 11 August 2011: Have you noticed how people’s funerals now take place longer and longer after their death? Such delay is not permitted in Judaism or Islam, religions which developed under hot suns, but it is now quite common for Christian or godless crem funerals to be held […]
Funerals are for…
Four comments here from this article in yesterday’s Guardian. Organising the funeral for my 17 year old son, who died in an accident overseas in Sept 2008, was made vastly easier by the wonderfully kind funeral director and an equally wonderful C of E Canon – a Canon whose first words on meeting us were […]
The foetus and the corpse: where does identity begin and end?
There’s an interesting review in the London Review of Books (14 April) of After We Die: The Life and Times of the Human Cadaver by Norman Cantor. Here are just a few snapshots from the review by Steven Shapin. It’s not available online unless you hand over a wad at the subscription roadblock. In the […]
Fogey funerals
There are two ways of looking at it – aren’t there always? Either funerals, by loosening up, jettisoning the f-word and calling themselves celebrations of life, are becoming more meaningful, more expressive of what people want to express; or they have become merely conventions of gaudily-clad denialists engaged in an altogether silly and fruitless buck-u-uppo […]
