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 […]
Individuality in the Requiem Mass?
Posted by Richard Rawlinson Réquiem ætérnam dona eis, Dómine (Eternal rest give to them, O Lord). There is often talk about the tone of funerals: the balance between celebrating a life and grieving a loss; the ratio of bespoke parts reflecting individuality, to formulaic parts reflecting the universality of death. Catholics expect this balance in […]
A Catholic take on funeral diversity
Posted by Richard Rawlinson First, may I thank this blog’s host for encouraging me to think about my own expectations of funerals as a Catholic. One readily assumes theists and atheists approach funerals differently, just as we part ways on the subject of the soul’s life after the body’s death. Some non-believers might find following […]
The Work of the People
By Vale Some words seem problematic for the secularist. There was a good to-and-fro recently about ‘ritual’ on the blog a while ago and, in Funerals Without God, Jane Wilson says (a little sniffily to my mind) that Humanists talk about ‘ceremonies’ rather than ‘services’ because ceremonies are about celebration and mutual support while ‘service’ merely […]
She’s on 29
Have you been following Gail Rubin’s 30 funerals in 30 days? I hope so. If you haven’t, you can easily catch up. Go over to her site as soon as you’ve read this and take up where you left off. The cultural differences are intriguing. The preaching at religious funerals in the US is hotter. […]
The sacred and the propane
It was a deepseated thing, this duty we felt we owed our dead. A sacred duty – literally. It goes back to the beginning of time. Throughout human history the dead body has always been treated in accordance with sacred diktat, its valedictory hullabaloos performed by shaman or sorcerer, soothsayer or priest. For the full […]
Godsmacked
It could have been a funeral-home scene out of a “Sopranos” episode. At the wake for crime author Philip Carlo, Tony Danza angrily interrupted the priest, claiming he was talking too much about God and not enough about the best-selling biographer of mass murderers. “Tony, who was one of Carlo’s closest friends, walked right up to […]
Communard in the community
There was a nice piece in yesterday’s Mirror about Richard Coles. In the eighties he was one half of the Communards; now he’s a Church of England priest. In an age in which churchpeople are customarily pelted with derision, it’s worth calling to mind some of the virtuous deeds that Coles and his kind perform […]
