A Good Send Off
A Good Send Off was the title of this year’s Centre for Death and Society (CDAS) annual conference. Well, part of the title – the snappy part. In full it read: A Good Send Off: Local, Regional & National Variations in how the British Dispose of their Dead. It took place last Saturday in Bath. […]
Fooneytunes
There are limitations to blogging. If a post looks overlong people won’t read it. So you need to stick to a single line of argument; you haven’t space to expand or balance. Once you’ve written it you must strip it down, starting with the best bits. As you contemplate clicking Publish, vanity warns you that […]
The difference between you and it
I think we’ve all done some good hard thinking, over the last few months, about the value and role of the dead body at a funeral. The discussion of this, and other matters, has elicited some extremely interesting ideas and some statements which, to my eyes, look likely to become axioms. I’m thinking of Gloria […]
Maggie Brinklow on what makes a good funeral
Everyone agrees that choice in funeral arrangements is a good thing. Even the UK’s most Jurassic undertakers are nodding their heads fervently on this one. They’ve come round at last (sort of). It’s the mantra in Funeralland: Personalisation x 3 (I can’t be bothered to type it). There’s money in it, of course. Because personalisation […]
Coherence vs incoherence
More resonances with Rupert Callender’s post in the latest Chester diocesan newsletter. In it, Bishop Peter Forster talks about funerals: I have been thinking recently about funerals – not my own, particularly, although having just obtained my bus pass (and other welcome perks) in idle moments that has crossed my thoughts. My mind has been […]
Formality vs informality
Here’s an interesting blog post from a US preacher called Dave. Well, judge for yourself from these extracts. There is much in what he says which resonates with what Rupert Callender wrote yesterday. This past Saturday I had the privilege of conducting a funeral service for a 21-year-old who died the week before in a motorcycle accident. […]
Real funeral
I like this. It’s a report of a funeral in Arkansas: Friends bid farewell to Jim Powell at a memorial service this afternoon at Second Baptist Church. The retired Gazette editorial page editor died Wednesday at 90. Glenn Beck would have hated it. Ray Higgins and Matt Cook eulogized Jim in a manner keeping with […]
A party for a parting
Jonathan posted an interesting thought the other day: “if no-one had portrayed the pseudovictoriana we associate with funerals, can you think of anyone who would have invented it for themselves?.” It raises the question: if we were to start again with a clean sheet, how would we do them? It’s a big question. Do funerals […]
No service by request
One more go at Canada’s Times Colonist. A rich seam, this. There are 13 obits in the paper. Of those, 3 opt for no service; 3 opt for a celebration of life (I’m not sure exactly what that is, but at least one of them’s not a funeral); 4 opt for a memorial service; and […]
The great reveller
A Christian funeral proclaims the fierce, happy truth that ‘Death is swallowed up in victory’. As Christians see it, Sin corrupts and depraves, Death annihilates and nullifies. Both are the spawn of Satan, who is Evil, the mortal (lit) enemy of God who is Good and, the theology goes, the victor in the end. It’s […]
