Recently in Funerals and Burial Category

Culture and Media Institute (via):

[CNN's Valerie] Streit writes that while dying may be very natural, modern burying rituals such as “formaldehyde-based solutions” and “concrete vaults” are not at all “nature-friendly.” The Green Burial Council's executive director Joe Sehee supported the basis for Streit’s point by saying that “We can rebuild the Golden Gate Bridge with that amount of metal,” he said referring to Streit’s figure that the U.S. buries 1.6 million tons of reinforced concrete, and 90,000 tons of steal each year. “The amount of concrete is enough to build a two-lane highway from New York to Detroit."

But there’s more to burial than just the body. The story ignored what eco-burial means for Americans with religious belief. Traditionally, Catholics have strictly practiced burials and not cremation of the deceased body because cremation can be viewed as a dismissal of the belief in the resurrection of the body and was commonly practiced in pagan cultures. Streit failed to include any religious figure’s opinion in the piece.

C&M raises an interesting point of discussion for Christians.

Obviously when the dead in Christ are raised on His return God will have to re-make all those corporeal beings lost to fires, explosions, burials at sea, and the effects of time. Since He made people to begin with He's up to the task of remaking them. But it does raise the point that hope in the resurrection will lead folks to elect to have their bodies buried intact. Shouldn't we respect that?

The article remindes me that I once reviewed Mark Harris' excellent book Grave Matters. The post was lost to the ether when the Wordpress version of evaneco.com crashed last summer.

Sort of like a blog version of cremation. Ugh.

Anyway, in a nutshell, his book thoughtfully covered many topics related to the funeral industry, including, well, people pollution. At the time I felt this was an important topic with which more and more pastors were going to be confronted.

That's still true.

UPDATE: Rest in freeze-dried peace.