So this book is an appeal for reform, but certainly not for repristination. There never was a “golden age” to be nostalgic about, a time when Christians somehow got everything right about funerals. Christian funeral practices have from the beginning been tightly woven into their social contexts, and they necessarily adapt and respond to shifts in the culture. We should learn from our history, but whatever shape Christian funerals will take in the twenty-first century, they must not be attempts to re-create practices of the fifth or sixteenth or nineteenth century. Instead they must be doable,
...more
